Britain's largest dinosaur footprint site discovered in Oxfordshire

Britain’s largest dinosaur track, more than 166 million years old, has been discovered in an Oxfordshire mine.

A worker at the Dewards Farm Mine, while driving an excavator, observed 200 footprints and encountered several humps in the ground.

Experts believe that the criss-crossing tracks on the limestone floor were made by the long-necked sauropod Cetiosaurus and the carnivore Megalosaurus, the longest tracks being 150 meters long.

More than 100 scientists, students and volunteers joined excavations at the mine this summer, which will be featured in a new BBC series. Drilling for Britain.

Modern techniques and technology mean that prints can be recorded much more comprehensively than ever before (But Nichols)

“It’s one of the most impressive places I’ve ever seen, in terms of scale, in terms of the size of the tracks,” said Professor Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontologist from the University of Birmingham.

“You can go back in time and get an idea of these massive creatures just wandering around doing their business.”

Five different routes have been discovered, but more can be found as only part of the mine has been excavated. Dinosaur tracks were previously discovered at a nearby location in the 1990s.

At that time, dinosaurs lived in an environment that was covered by a shallow wetland, and their footprints were left in the mud as they passed through.

The site in Oxfordshire where the tracks were discovered (Emma Nicholls / University of Birmingham / PA Wire)

Scientists analyzing the footprints have theorized that something must have happened to preserve the fossils, such as a storm that deposited sediment on top of the footprints and prevented them from being washed away.

Professor Richard Butler, a paleontologist at the University of Birmingham, said: “The lovely thing about a dinosaur track, especially if you have a track, is that it’s a snapshot of the animal’s life.

“You can learn things about how that animal moved. You can learn exactly what the environment was like. So the tracks give us a whole different set of information that you can’t get from the fossil record. Get a bone.”

To analyze the artifacts, the team of researchers took more than 20,000 photographs to create 3D models of the footprints and made molds of the footprints.

(Carolyn Wood / University of Birmingham / PA Wire)

Four of the tracks were made by sauropods, which walked on four legs and reached a length of 18 meters.

Other dinosaurs are thought to have been built by a Megalosaurus, which was an agile predator and could have been “the largest known predatory dinosaur from the Jurassic period in Britain”.

The mine’s operators, Smiths Belchington, are now working with scientists and Natural England on options to preserve the site, with no final decision made on the future of the tracks.