The longest of the tracks traced by one of them extends 150 meters long in the Dewars Farm quarry, a veritable “dinosaur highway” where herbivores and carnivores crossed paths during the Middle Jurassic period. “It is very rare to find such large numbers in one place, and to discover such extensive tracks,” said Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Oxford Natural History Museum. Tracks which could extend much further because, for the moment, only part of the quarry has been dug, according to the BBC.
The largest site in the world
According to her, it could also be one of the largest footprint sites in the world. The first of these were discovered in June by Gary Johnson, a worker who was working with a backhoe in this quarry operated by a company, Smiths Bletchington. “I realized I was the first person to see them, it was surreal,” he told the BBC.
In the days that followed, around 100 people took part in excavations supervised by the two universities, at the site of what was an ancient, shallow, warm-water lagoon.
For the moment, scientists do not know what made it possible to preserve these traces left in the mud, “but it could be that a storm deposited sediment on the footprints, which could have frozen them,” indicated Richard Butler , paleobiologist at the University of Birmingham. Four tracks were left by sauropods – these gigantic, long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs – probably of the Cetiosaurus species. Animals that measured up to 18 meters long, and whose footprints resemble those of an elephant, but much larger. The fifth mark was probably left by a megalosaur, the largest Jurassic predator in England, which walked on two legs and whose three claws can clearly be seen in the ground.
The quarry was extensively photographed by drones to create 3D models and preserve this exceptional discovery.
