The UK’s largest dinosaur footprint trackways have been unearthed

The UK’s largest dinosaur trackway site has been discovered at a quarry in Oxfordshire.

About 200 large footprints, made 166 million years ago, criss-cross the limestone floor.

They revealed the comings and goings of two different types of dinosaurs believed to be a long-necked sauropod called Cetiosaurus and the smaller meat-eating Megalosaurus.

The longest trackway is 150m long, but it can be extended as only part of the quarry has been excavated.

“This is one of the most impressive track sites I’ve seen, in terms of scale, in terms of the size of the tracks,” said Prof Kirsty Edgar, a micropalaeontologist from the University of Birmingham.

“You can step back in time and get an idea of ​​what it’s like, these big creatures going around, going about their own business.”

The tracks were first discovered by Gary Johnson, a worker at Dewars Farm Quarry, while he was driving a digger.

“I was basically clearing the clay, and I hit a hump, and I thought it’s just an abnormality in the ground,” he said, pointing to a ridge where some mud had been pushed up as the dinosaur’s foot pressed into the ground. .

“But then it came to another one, 3m along, and it was a hump again.

Another trackway site was found nearby in the 1990s, so he realized that the regular bumps and dips could be dinosaur footprints.

“I thought I was the first person to see them. And it was surreal – a bit of a tingling moment, really,” he told BBC News.

This summer, more than 100 scientists, students and volunteers took part in an excavation at the quarry which featured in the new Digging for Britain series.

The team found five different trackways.

Four of them were made by sauropods, plant-eating dinosaurs that walked on four legs. Their footprints look like those of an elephant – only bigger – these animals reach 18m in length.

Another track is believed to have been made by a Megalosaurus.

“It’s almost like a caricature of a dinosaur footprint”, explained Dr Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

“This is what we call a tridactyl print. It has three toes that are very distinct in the print.”

The carnivorous creatures, which walk on two legs, are keen hunters, he said.

“The whole animal would have been 6-9m long. They were the largest predatory dinosaurs we know from the Jurassic period in Britain.”

The environment they lived in was covered in a warm, shallow lagoon and the dinosaurs left their footprints as they ambled through the mud.

“Something has happened to preserve it in the fossil record,” said Prof Richard Butler, a palaeobiologist from the University of Birmingham.

“We don’t know what, but it could be that a storm happened, depositing a load of sediments on top of the footprints, and meaning they were preserved instead of just being washed away.”

The team studied the trackways in detail during the excavation. As well as making casts of the tracks, they took more than 20,000 photos to create 3D models of the complete site and individual tracks.

“The really beautiful thing about a dinosaur footprint, especially when you have a trackway, is that it’s a snapshot of the animal’s life,” Prof Butler explained.

“You can learn things about how the animal moves. You can learn what the environment is that it lives in. So the tracks give us a different set of information that you can’t get from the record of bone fossil.”

An area of ​​the site reveals where the tracks of a sauropod and megalosaurus once crossed.

The prints were so well-preserved that the team knew which animal came first – they assumed it was a sauropod, because the front edge of its large, round footprint was slightly pinched by the three-legged megalosaurus walking. above it.

“Knowing that this one individual dinosaur walked across this surface and left this exact footprint is very exciting,” said Dr Duncan Murdock from Oxford University.

“You can imagine it going through, pulling its legs out of the mud as it goes.”

The future fate of the tracks has yet to be decided but scientists are working with Smiths Bletchington, which operates the quarry, and Natural England on options to preserve the site for the future.

They believe that there are many footprints, these echoes of our prehistoric past, waiting to be discovered.

Excavation is shown in Dig for Britain on BBC Two at 20:00 on Wednesday 8 January. The whole series will be available on BBC iPlayer on 7 January.