The green meadows and medieval towns of the Home Counties are probably the last place you’d think gigantic monsters moseyed.
But around 200 dinosaur footprints have been found stamped into the limestone of an Oxfordshire quarry.
Said to be the biggest site of its kind in the UK, this ‘dinosaur highway’ was made some 166 million years ago when the county was a muddy lagoon.
Some big beasts believed to have made the prints include the 10-foot-tall Megalosaurus, a creature more akin to a scaly dragon with eyes the size of birthday cakes that roamed the Middle Jurassic Period.
Or the even larger long-necked sauropod Cetiosaurus (See-TEE-oh-sore-us) ‘whose name literally means ‘whale lizard’.
‘Whilst individual, or a handful, of dinosaur footprints have been found elsewhere, the discovery of such an incredibly large area being covered in entire trackways is extremely exciting,’ Dr Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate palaeontologist at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, told Metro.
‘It is so extensive, that this is the largest dinosaur trackway site in Britain and probably within the top five of the whole world.’
One area of the site seems to show the ‘fearsome’ Megalosaurs hunting down the towering herbivore, Dr Nicholls said.
‘We know that the carnivore came along afterwards as the back of the footprint has displaced some of the sediment that formed the huge Cetiosaurus print,’ she said.
‘We can also see that a few metres on from this ‘intersection’, this particular Cetiosaurus stopped and appears to have looked back (we can tell this from the prints it made, which here are slightly different to the rest of the track) which could well be showing the Cetiosaurus looking back at the Megalosaurus.
‘This could all be evidence of hunting, or it may just be a coincidence of course, we cannot know for sure.’
The fossilized tracks have been preserved so perfectly that the way the mud squelched under the dinosaur’s feet can be made out.
Gary Johnson, who works at Dewars Farm Quarry, found the tracks while clearing clay last year. He spotted a ‘hump’ that turned out to be where a dinosaur once casually trodden.
‘I thought I’m the first person to see them. And it was so surreal – a bit of a tingling moment, really,’ he told the BBC.
More than 100 scientists and students from the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham and volunteers excavated the prints in June. After digging and dusting, the team created 3-D models of the footmarks and the area.
The timing couldn’t have been any more perfect, Professor Kirsty Edgar, a University of Birmingham professor in micropalaeontology, the study of microscopic fossils, told Metro.
‘Megalosaurus, one of the dinosaurs whose tracks are found at the site, was the first dinosaur to be scientifically described and named in 1824, and 2024 was the 200th anniversary of dinosaurs,’ she said.
‘I’m just slightly in awe that I’m standing exactly where some of the largest animals to have existed once stood, and I love trying to think about where they were going, and why.’
Professor Susannah Maidment, of the Natural History Museum’s Fossil Reptiles Research Group, said trackways are a key way to understand how dinosaurs spent their days.
‘Trackways are important because they preserve fossilized behaviour – something that we are unable to get from the bones of an animal alone,’ she told Metro. ‘For example, fossilized trackways have indicated that some dinosaurs lived in herds.
‘Individual footprints are quite commonly found in the UK, especially on the coasts around Sussex, the Isle of Wight and Yorkshire, but a whole trackway is much more significant.’
Case and point, Dr Nicholls says experts have already figured out the Megalosaurus and Cetiosaurus were walking roughly the same speed despite the herbivore being twice the predator’s size; about three miles per hour, the average speed of a human.
This isn’t the first time dinosaur discoveries have been made in Oxfordshire.
Over the decades, fossils of aquatic critters like the whorled shells of squirmy ammonites and cephalopods have been discovered in the county that was once a warm, shallow sea.
About 40 footprint sets were dug up at the Ardley Quarry and landfill in 1997. Some were so detailed that claw marks could be seen, while another was 180 metres long.
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