Researchers said Thursday that they had discovered a dinosaur roadway and nearly 200 tracks that are 166 million years old after a worker in a limestone quarry in southern England observed strange bumps while digging up clay.
Researchers from the universities of Oxford and Birmingham said the remarkable discovery, which was made after a team of over 100 individuals dug up the Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire in June, builds on earlier paleontological studies in the region and provides new information about the Middle Jurassic period.
According to Kirsty Edgar, a professor of micropaleontology at the University of Birmingham, these footprints provide an incredible window into the life of dinosaurs, providing information on their travels, interactions, and the tropical climate they lived in.
The so-called highway is made up of four sets of tracks that depict the routes followed by enormous, long-necked herbivores known as sauropods, which are believed to be the approximately 60-foot-long Cetiosaurus dinosaur. The Megalosaurus, a fierce 30-foot predator that left a characteristic triple-claw print and was the first dinosaur to be given a scientific name two centuries ago, owned a fifth set.
Questions concerning potential interactions between the herbivores and carnivores are raised by a region where the tracks cross.
According to Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Megalosaurus has been known about and studied for longer than any other dinosaur on Earth, but these new findings show that there is still more evidence of these creatures out there, just waiting to be discovered.
Forty sets of footprints found in a nearby limestone quarry were regarded as one of the most significant dinosaur track sites in the world from a scientific standpoint about thirty years ago. However, since that location predates the introduction of digital cameras and drones to document the finds, it is now largely inaccessible, and there is little visual evidence.
Using drones and over 20,000 digital photos, the team who worked at the site this summer produced 3-D models of the prints. Future research will benefit from the wealth of documentation, which may also provide insight into the dinosaurs’ size, gait, and speed.
Duncan Murdock, an earth scientist at the Oxford Museum, remarked, “The preservation is so detailed that we can see how the mud was deformed as the dinosaur’s feet squelched in and out.” In addition to other relics such as burrows, shells, and plants, we can recreate the muddy lagoon habitat that the dinosaurs traversed.
Next week, the results will be aired on the BBC’s Digging for Britain program and displayed at a new exhibit at the museum.
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