British researchers have unearthed around 200 dinosaur tracks dating back 166 million years, in what is believed to be Britain's biggest find.
Teams from the universities of Oxford and Birmingham made the “exciting” discovery in a quarry in Oxfordshire, central England, after a worker came across “unusual irregularities” while removing clay with a mechanical excavator, according to a new BBC documentary.
“This is one of the most impressive track sites I've ever seen, in terms of scale, in terms of the size of the tracks,” said Professor Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontologist at the University of Birmingham. 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 has five wide walkways, with the longest continuous walkway 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 cetacean.
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According to the University of Birmingham, the fifth set of tracks is likely to belong to the nine-metre carnivorous Megalosaurus, known for its distinctive three-toed clawed fingers.
“It's rare to see so many of them in one place, and it's rare to find tracks this wide,” Emma Nicholls of Oxford University's Natural History Museum told AFP.
She added that the area could become one of the world's largest dinosaur tracking sites.
The discovery will be featured in a BBC documentary “Dig for Britain”which will air on January 8.
An “exciting” discovery
A 100-strong team led by academics from Oxford and Birmingham unearthed the tracks during a week-long dig in June.
The new tracks followed a smaller discovery in the area in 1997, when limestone mining uncovered 40 tracks, with some tracks as long as 180 meters.
Researchers took 20,000 photos of the last tracks 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 interacted, as well as their size and the speeds at which they moved.
“Knowing that this particular dinosaur walked on that surface and left that particular footprint is very exciting,” Duncan Murdoch of the Oxford Museum told the BBC. “You can imagine him making his way, pulling his feet out of the mud.”
Emma Nichols/AP
Richard Butler, a palaeobiologist at the University of Birmingham, said random weather could be the reason the tracks were so well preserved.
“We don't know for sure … but it could be that there was a storm that deposited a load of sediment on top of the tracks, which meant they were preserved and not just washed away,” he said. said.
Quarry worker Gary Johnson, whose foresight sparked the excavation, said the experience was mesmerizing.
“I thought I was the first person to see them. And it was so surreal – a bit of a moving moment actually,” he said. told BBC News.
The discovery was announced just months after a team of paleontologists found it matching dinosaur tracks on what are now two different continents separated by thousands of miles of ocean.
Last year, engineers working to prevent flooding on beaches in the UK did “dramatic revelation” dinosaur footprints, which experts believe may come from Monteliosaurs, a type of dinosaur that had only three toes on each foot and walked on its hind legs.