Largest dinosaur footprint site ever discovered in Britain

Britain’s largest dinosaur trackway site ever discovered has been discovered in a quarry in Oxfordshire.

There are approximately 200 giant footprints on the limestone floor, which were formed 166 million years ago.

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

The longest trackway is 150 meters in length, but they may extend further as only part of the mine has been excavated.

“In terms of scale, in terms of the size of the tracks, it’s one of the most impressive track sites I’ve ever seen,” said Professor Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontologist at the University of Birmingham.

“You can go back in time and imagine what it must have been like, these huge creatures just wandering around, doing their thing.”

The tracks were first seen by Gary Johnson, an employee at Dewars Farm Quarry, while he was driving an excavator.

“I was basically clearing soil, and I hit a hump, and I thought it was just an abnormality in the ground,” he said, pointing to a hill where some soil stuck to the ground like a dinosaur’s foot. Is buried in.

“But then it went another 3 metres, and it became a hump again. And then it went another 3 meters – a hump again.”

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

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

This summer, more than 100 scientists, students and volunteers joined the excavations at the mine, which forms part of a new series of excavations for Britain.

The team found five different trackways.

Four of them were created by sauropods, plant-eating dinosaurs that walked on four legs. Their footprints look somewhat like those of an elephant – only much larger – these animals reach up to 18 meters in length.

Another track is believed to have been made by Megalosaurus.

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

“It’s what we call a tridactyl print. It has three toes that are very, very pronounced in the print.”

He said, carnivorous creatures that walked on two legs were agile hunters.

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

The environment in which they lived was covered by a warm, shallow lagoon and the dinosaurs left their marks as they roamed in the mud.

“Something must have happened to preserve them in the fossil record,” said Professor Richard Butler, a paleontologist at the University of Birmingham.

“We don’t know exactly what, but there may have been a storm that deposited a lot of sediment over the footprints, and that means they’ve been preserved rather than just washed away.”

The team studied the trackway in detail during the excavation. As well as making casts of the track, they took over 20,000 photographs to create 3D models of both the entire site and individual footprints.

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

“You can learn how that animal moved. You can learn what the environment it was living in was really like. So the tracks give us a completely different set of information that you can’t get from the bone fossil record.” Can get.”

An area of ​​the site also reveals where the paths of sauropods and Megalosaurus once crossed.

The prints are so beautifully preserved that the team has been able to figure out which animal passed through first – they believe it was a sauropod, because the front edge of its large, rounded footprint had three claws. The one that got crushed a bit by the Megalosaurus. on top of this.

“To know that this was a dinosaur walked on this surface and left exactly the same print is very exciting,” said Dr Duncan Murdock of the University of Oxford.

“You can imagine it digging its legs out of the mud.”

The future fate of the trackway has not yet been decided, but scientists are working with Smiths Blatchington, who operate the mine, and Natural England on options to preserve the site for the future.

He believes there may be more footprints, echoes of our prehistoric past, just waiting to be discovered.

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