Huge 166,000,000-year-old dinosaur footprints discovered in Oxfordshire
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The green meadows and medieval towns of the Home Counties are probably the last place you’d think gigantic monsters moseyed. But around 200 dinosaur footprints have been found stamped into the limestone of an Oxfordshire quarry. Said to be the biggest site of its kind in the UK, this ‘dinosaur highway’ was made some 166 million years ago when the county was a muddy lagoon.
Some big beasts believed to have made the prints include the 10-foot-tall Megalosaurus, a creature more akin to a scaly dragon with eyes the size of birthday cakes that roamed the Middle Jurassic Period. Or the even larger long-necked sauropod Cetiosaurus (See-TEE-oh-sore-us) ‘whose name literally means ‘whale lizard’.
‘Whilst individual, or a handful, of dinosaur footprints have been found elsewhere, the discovery of such an incredibly large area being covered in entire trackways is extremely exciting,’ Dr Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate palaeontologist at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, told Metro.
![[Dewars Farm artist reconstruction Megalosaurus and Cetiosaurus landscape ? Mark Witton]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_234766661-9176.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
‘It is so extensive, that this is the largest dinosaur trackway site in Britain and probably within the top five of the whole world.’. One area of the site seems to show the ‘fearsome’ Megalosaurs hunting down the towering herbivore, Dr Nicholls said.
‘We know that the carnivore came along afterwards as the back of the footprint has displaced some of the sediment that formed the huge Cetiosaurus print,’ she said. ‘We can also see that a few metres on from this ‘intersection’, this particular Cetiosaurus stopped and appears to have looked back (we can tell this from the prints it made, which here are slightly different to the rest of the track) which could well be showing the Cetiosaurus looking back at the Megalosaurus.
![[default]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_234766834-4f15.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
