Wubi News

UK's biggest ever dinosaur footprint site unearthed

2025-01-02 15:00:35

The UK's biggest ever dinosaur trackway site has been discovered in a quarry in Oxfordshire.

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

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

The longest trackways are 150m in length, but they could extend much further as only part of the quarry has been excavated.

"This is one of the most impressive track sites I've ever 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 would have been like, these massive creatures just roaming around, going about their own business."

Scientists think these distinctive three-toed prints were made by a Megalosaurus

This summer, more than 100 scientists, students and volunteers joined an excavation at the quarry which features on the new series of Digging for Britain.

The team found five different trackways.

Four of them were made by sauropods, plant-eating dinosaurs that walked on four legs. Their footprints look a bit like an elephant's - only much much bigger - these beasts reached up to 18m in length.

Another track is thought to have been created by a Megalosaurus.

"It's almost like a caricature of a dinosaur footprint", explained Dr Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate palaeontologist from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

"It's what we call a tridactyl print. It's got these three toes that are very, very clear in the print."

The carnivorous creatures, which walked on two legs, were agile hunters, she said.

"The whole animal would have been 6-9m in length. They were the largest predatory dinosaurs that we know of in the Jurassic period in Britain."

The dinosaurs left their mark as they walked across a tropical lagoon

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

"Something must have happened to preserve these in the fossil record," said Prof Richard Butler, a palaeobiologist from the University of Birmingham.

"We don't know exactly what, but it might be that there was a storm event that came in, deposited a load of sediments on top of the footprints, and meant that they were preserved rather than just being washed away."

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

"The really lovely thing about a dinosaur footprint, particularly if you have a trackway, is that it is a snapshot in the life of the animal," Prof Butler explained.

"You can learn things about how that animal moved. You can learn exactly what the environment that it was living in was like. So tracks give us a whole different set of information that you can't get from the bone fossil record."