British researchers have discovered some 200 dinosaur footprints dating back 166 million years in a discovery believed to be the UK’s largest.
Teams from the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham made the ‘exhilarating’ discovery at a quarry in Oxfordshire, central England, after a worker encountered ‘unusual bumps’ while removing clay with a mechanical shovel, according to a new BBC documentary.
“This is one of the most impressive track sites I have ever seen, in terms of the scale and size of the tracks,” said Professor Kirsty Edgar, a micropalaeontologist from the University of Birmingham. told BBC News. “You can go back in time and get a sense of what it would have been like, these huge creatures wandering around, minding their own business.”
The site includes five extensive tracks, with the longest continuous track spanning nearly 500 feet in length.
Four of the five tracks discovered would have been made by a long-necked herbivorous dinosaur, most likely a cetiosaur.
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The fifth set of tracks likely belongs to a nine-meter-long carnivorous megalosaur, known for its distinctive three-toed paws with claws, according to the University of Birmingham.
“It’s rare to find so many in one place and it’s also rare to find such extensive tracks,” Emma Nicholls of the Oxford University Natural History Museum told AFP.
The region could become one of the largest dinosaur track sites in the world, she added.
The discovery will feature in BBC television documentary “Digging for Britain”scheduled for release on January 8.
“Exhilarating” discovery
A team of 100 people led by academics from Oxford and Birmingham searched the tracks during a week-long dig in June.
The new footprints follow a smaller discovery in the area in 1997, when 40 sets were discovered during limestone mining, with some tracks reaching up to 180 meters in length.
Researchers took 20,000 photographs of the final footprints and created detailed 3D models of the site using drone aerial photography.
It is hoped that this discovery will provide clues about how dinosaurs interacted, as well as how big they were and how fast they moved.
“To know that this unique dinosaur walked on this surface and left exactly this footprint is so exhilarating,” Duncan Murdock of the Oxford Museum told the BBC. “You can kind of imagine it pushing its way through, pulling its paws out of the mud as it goes.”
Emma Nicholls/AP
Richard Butler, a paleobiologist from the University of Birmingham, said random weather conditions could be why the tracks were so well preserved.
“We don’t know exactly… but it could be that a storm came through, depositing a load of sediment on the prints and meaning they were preserved rather than just washed away,” he said.
Quarry worker Gary Johnson, whose vigilance sparked the excavation, said the experience had been spellbinding.
“I thought I was the first person to see them. And it was so surreal – a bit of a tingling moment, really,” he said. told BBC News.
The discovery was announced just months after a team of paleontologists discovered match dinosaur footprints on what are now two different continents, separated by thousands of kilometers of ocean.
Last year, engineers working to prevent flooding at a UK beach carried out a “Dramatic discovery” of dinosaur footprints that experts say may come from a mantellisaur, a type of dinosaur that had only three toes on each foot and moved on its hind legs.