It is already nicknamed “the dinosaur highway” and for good reason… With around 200 footprints printed in the rock, this site becomes the most important of its kind for the United Kingdom. The length of the tracks is indeed impressive, the longest being up to 150 meters long, as revealed in this article from the BBC who documented the discovery. They could even extend even further, because only part of the site has been cleared. The discovery was made in a quarry in Oxfordshire, a county west of London. But it’s not just the length of the tracks that is remarkable, the sheer size of the footprints is also impressive and reveals the passage of several species of giant dinosaurs in this region 166 million years ago.
Heavy vehicle traffic 166 million years ago!
The analysis of the prints made it possible to attribute four of the five tracks discovered to Cetiosauruslong-necked sauropods that could reach 18 meters in length. The last track, with its three-toed prints, is typical of a theropod. It would have been produced by a megalosaur, a carnivore that could reach three meters in height and a length of six to nine meters!
It was a quarry employee, Gary Johnson, who made this incredible discovery. While digging in the chalk layer with his excavator, the man noticed a strange shape on the stratestrate limestonelimestone located below. A form that he found three meters further, then even further. The shape and regularity of the traces then alerted him, especially knowing that a trail of dinosaur footprints had already been unearthed nearby in the 1990s.
Alerted, researchers then came to the site to formally identify the prints and begin an excavation campaign.
Footprints left on the muddy banks of a lagoon
The quality of the prints thus proved to be quite remarkable. It also reveals the environment in which these two species of dinosaurs evolved. In the middle of the period that we call the JurassicJurassicthe site of the chalk quarry of Dewars Farm is located on the edge of a warm, shallow lagoon, whose muddy banks have perfectly imprinted the footprints of these giants weighing several tons. But this is not enough to have allowed this exceptional conservation. As explained in BBC Richard Butler, a paleobiologist from the University of Birmingham, a sudden event, like a stormstormcertainly quickly covered the prints with a thick layer of sedimentsedimentthus preventing them from being eroded.
Dinosaur footprints discovered in a quarry date back 166 million years. © BBC News
This preservation today delights scientists, because it allows us to reveal a host of details concerning the locomotion of these dinosaurs. The whole objective now is to continue the excavations and preserve this extraordinary site. It is indeed likely that the tracks continue below the still uncleared chalk levels or that new ones will be revealed.
