A very rare, even unique, discovery. Nearly 200 dinosaur footprints were discovered this summer in a quarry in Oxfordshire (south-east England), on the largest site ever revealed in the United Kingdom, the universities of Oxford announced on Thursday January 2 and Birmingham.
The longest of the tracks traced by one of them extends 150 m 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 the same place, and to discover such extensive tracks,” Emma Nicholls, a paleontologist specializing in vertebrates at the Natural History Museum of the University of London, told AFP. ‘Oxford. 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.
Traces of sauropods and megalosaurus
Scientists don’t know exactly what preserved these traces left in the mud, “but it could be that a storm deposited sediment on the footprints, which helped to freeze them,” said Richard Butler, paleobiologist from the University of Birmingham.
Four tracks were left by sauropods, long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs, probably of the Cetiosaurus species. These animals measured up to 18 m in length, and their footprints resemble those of a much larger elephant. The fifth mark was probably left by a megalosaurus, a ferocious 9 m predator from Jurassic England, which walked on two legs and whose three claws can clearly be seen in the ground.
“These footprints provide an extraordinary window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing details about their movements, interactions and the tropical environment in which they lived,” said Kirsty Edgar, professor of micropalaeontology at the University of Birmingham as quoted by Associated Press.
This quarry was extensively photographed by drone to create 3D models and preserve this exceptional discovery, which will shed light on the size of the dinosaurs, their way of walking and the speed at which they moved. In 1997, another site with around forty footprints was discovered nearby, but it is no longer accessible today and the elements collected at the time are limited.
