British researchers have found around 200 dinosaur footprints dating back 166 million years in what is believed to be the largest find in the UK.
Teams from the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham made the “amazing” discovery at a quarry in Oxfordshire in central England after a worker came across “unusual lumps” while retrieving clay with a mechanical digging, 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 Dr Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontologist from the University of Birmingham. to BBC News. “You can step back in time and get an idea of what it would have been like, these huge creatures just moving 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 found are believed to have been made by a long-necked herbivorous dinosaur, likely a cetiosaurus.
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The fifth set of tracks appears to belong to a 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 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.
The area could turn into one of the biggest dinosaur track sites in the world, she said.
The discovery will feature in a BBC documentary “Digging for Britain”to be aired on January 8.
Find “amazing”.
A team of 100 people led by academics from Oxford and Birmingham excavated the tracks during a week-long dig in June.
The new footprints follow a smaller discovery in the area in 1997, when 40 sets were found during a limestone quarry, with some tracks reaching up to 180 meters in length.
The researchers took 20,000 photographs of the latest footprints and created detailed 3D models of the site using aerial drone footage.
It is hoped that this discovery will provide information on how dinosaurs interacted, as well as their size and the speed at which they moved.
“Knowing that this one individual dinosaur walked across this surface and left just that print is so exciting,” the Oxford museum's Duncan Murdock told the BBC. think he was making his way through, pulling his feet out of the mud as he went.”
Emma Nicholls / AP
Richard Butler, a paleobiologist from the University of Birmingham, said that bad weather may be the reason why the tracks were so well preserved.
“We don't know for sure… he said.
Quarry worker Gary Johnson, who promoted the dig, said the experience had been interesting.
“I thought I was the first person to see them. And it was so surreal — a moment of fear, really,” he said. to BBC News.
The discovery was announced just a few months after a team of paleontologists discovered it matching dinosaur footprints which are now two separate continents, separated by thousands of miles of ocean.
Last year, engineers working to prevent flooding on a UK beach did a “dramatic search” of dinosaur footprints that experts believe may be from mantellisaurus, a type of dinosaur that had only three toes on each foot and walked on its hind legs.
