British researchers have discovered around 200 dinosaur footprints dating back 166 million years in what is believed to be the largest discovery in the UK.
Teams from the universities of Oxford and Birmingham made the “exciting” discovery at a quarry in Oxfordshire, central England, after a worker encountered “strange bumps” while removing clay with a mechanical digger, according to a new BBC documentary.
“This is one of the most impressive footprint sites I’ve ever seen, in terms of scale, in terms of the size of the footprints,” said Prof. Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontologist from the University of Birmingham, he told BBC News. “You can go back in time and get an idea of what it would have been like if these huge creatures were just wandering around going about their business.”
The site features five extensive trails, with the longest continuous trail stretching nearly 500 feet in length.
Four of the five tracks discovered are believed to have been made by a long-necked herbivorous dinosaur, most likely a Cetiosaurus.
/ AP
A fifth set of tracks likely belongs to the nine-metre-long carnivorous megalosaurus known for its distinctive 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 such extensive tracks,” Emma Nicholls of Oxford University’s Natural History Museum told AFP.
That area could turn out to be one of the world’s largest dinosaur footprint sites, she added.
The discovery will be featured in a BBC television documentary “Digging for Britain”with airing on January 8th.
An “exciting” discovery
A 100-strong team led by academics from Oxford and Birmingham unearthed the clues during a week-long dig in June.
The new footprints followed a smaller discovery in the area in 1997, when 40 sets were discovered during limestone quarrying, with some tracks reaching up to 180 meters in length.
The researchers took 20,000 photos of the latest footprints and created detailed 3D models of the site using aerial drone photography.
It is hoped that the discovery will provide clues about how the dinosaurs communicated with each other, as well as their size and the speeds at which they moved.
“Knowing that this single dinosaur walked on this surface and left exactly that footprint is so exciting,” Duncan Murdock of the Oxford museum told the BBC. “You can imagine him making his way, pulling his feet out of the mud as he went.”
Emma Nicholls / AP
Richard Butler, a paleobiologist at the University of Birmingham, said that coincidental weather could be why the tracks are so well preserved.
“We don’t know for sure … but maybe there was a storm that deposited a lot of sediment on top of the footprints, which meant they were preserved and not just washed away,” he said. he said.
Quarry worker Gary Johnson, whose vigilance set the excavation in motion, said the experience was mesmerizing.
“I thought I was the first person to see them. And it was so surreal — a really spine-tingling moment,” he said. he told BBC News.
The discovery was announced just months after the discovery by a team of paleontologists matching dinosaur footprints on now two different continents, separated by thousands of miles of ocean.
Last year, engineers working to prevent flooding on a beach in the UK made “dramatic discovery” dinosaur footprints that experts believe may have come from Mantellisaurus, a type of dinosaur that had only three toes on each foot and traveled on its hind legs.
