Trackways of large dinosaur footprints found in Oxfordshire quarry
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Cetiosauruses and a megalosaurus are thought to have left prints at what is said to be largest site of its kind in UK. It is now a quarry in Oxfordshire. But nearly 166m years ago it was where a large number of dinosaurs crisscrossed the limestone floor.
Researchers have unearthed 200 large dinosaur footprints – said to be the biggest site of its kind in the UK – from two types of dinosaurs, thought to be the herbivorous cetiosaurus and the carnivorous megalosaurus. The longest trackways are 150 metres in length, and only part of the quarry has been excavated.
“This is one of the most impressive track sites I’ve ever seen, in terms of scale, in terms of size of the tracks,” Prof Kirsty Edgar, a micropalaeontologist from the University of Birmingham, told the BBC. “You can step back in time and get an idea of what it would have been like, these massive creatures just roaming around, going about their own business.”.
In 1997, a trackway of megalosaurus footprints was discovered at Ardley quarry in Oxfordshire. Recollections of that discovery led Gary Johnson, a worker at Dewars Farm quarry, to consider whether bumps and dips he had found in the limestone floor there could be dinosaur footprints.
“I was basically clearing the clay and I hit a bump, and I thought it’s just an abnormality in the ground,” Johnson told the BBC. “But then it got to another, 3 metres along, and it was a hump again, and then it went another 3 metres, hump again.”.
