British researchers have found around 200 dinosaur footprints dating back 166 million years in what is believed to be the largest find in the United Kingdom.
Teams from the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham made an “exciting” discovery at a quarry in Oxfordshire in central England after a worker came across “strange nodules” while removing clay with excavators, according to a new BBC documentary.
“This is one of the most impressive track sites I’ve ever seen, in terms of the size of the tracks,” Prof Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontologist at the University of Birmingham, told BBC News. “You can step back in time and get an idea of ​​what it would have been like, these giant animals just roaming around, doing their thing.”
The site has five wide lanes, with a long continuous track that is approximately 500 feet long.
Four of the five tracks discovered are believed to have been made by a long-necked herbivorous dinosaur, possibly a cetiosaurus.
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The fifth set of tracks probably belonged to the nine-foot carnivorous megalosaurus known for its three-toed clawed feet, according to the University of Birmingham.
“It’s rare to find so many in one place and it’s rare to find so many paths,” Emma Nicholls of Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History told AFP.
The area may be one of the largest dinosaur tracking sites in the world, he added.
The findings will appear in the BBC television documentary “Digging for Britain”, which will be broadcast on January 8.
An “exciting” discovery.
A team of 100 people led by academics from Oxford and Birmingham excavated the tracks during a week-long dig in June.
The new measures follow a small discovery in the area in 1997, when 40 sets were discovered during limestone excavation, some routes up to 180 meters long.
The researchers took 20,000 photos of the last steps and created detailed 3D models of the site using drone aerial photos.
It is hoped that the discovery will provide clues about how the dinosaurs interacted, as well as their size and speed.
“Knowing that this one dinosaur walked through this area and left that imprint is exciting,” Duncan Murdock of the Oxford museum told the BBC. “You can imagine it going by, dragging its legs through the mud as it goes.”
Emma Nicholls / AP
Richard Butler, a biologist from the University of Birmingham, said that the specific climate could be the reason why the tracks are so well preserved.
“We don’t know for sure…but it is possible that there was a storm that came and put a lot of soil on the steps, which meant that they were preserved instead of being washed away,” he said. said.
Quarry worker Gary Johnson, who oversaw the excavation, said his experience was amazing.
“I thought I was the first person to see them. And it was surreal — for a little while,” he told BBC News.
This discovery was announced a few months after the discovery by a team of archaeologists corresponding to dinosaur feet on what are now two separate continents, separated by thousands of miles of ocean.
Last year, engineers working to prevent coastal flooding in the UK did a “amazing discovery” of dinosaur feet that experts believe may have come from mantellisaurus, a type of dinosaur that had only three toes on each foot and walked on its hind legs.