A worker digging up clay in a southern England limestone quarry noticed unusual bumps that led to the discovery of a "dinosaur highway" and nearly 200 tracks that date back 166 million years, researchers said Thursday. The extraordinary find, made after a team of more than 100 excavated Oxfordshire's Dewars Farm Quarry in June, expands upon previous paleontology work in the area and offers greater insights into the Middle Jurassic period, researchers at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham said. "These footprints offer an extraordinary window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing details about their movements, interactions, and the tropical environment they inhabited," said Kirsty Edgar, a University of Birmingham micropaleontology professor, per the AP.
Four of the sets of tracks that make up the so-called highway show paths taken by gigantic, long-necked herbivores called sauropods, thought to be from Cetiosaurus, a dinosaur that grew to nearly 60 feet in length. A fifth set belonged to the Megalosaurus, a ferocious 30-foot predator that left a distinctive triple-claw print and was the first dinosaur to be scientifically named two centuries ago. An area where the tracks cross raises questions about possible interactions between the carnivores and herbivores. "Scientists have known about and been studying Megalosaurus for longer than any other dinosaur on Earth, and yet these recent discoveries prove there is still new evidence of these animals out there, waiting to be found," said Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
The group that worked at the site this summer took more than 20,000 digital images and used drones to create 3D models of the prints. The trove of documentation will aid future studies and could shed light on the size of the dinosaurs, how they walked, and the speed at which they moved. "The preservation is so detailed that we can see how the mud was deformed as the dinosaur's feet squelched in and out," said Duncan Murdock, an earth scientist at the Oxford museum. The findings will be shown at a new exhibit at the museum and also broadcast on the BBC's Digging for Britain program next week.
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