Six months ago, a team of paleontologists investigated a quarry in Oxfordshire, England, that had some unusual bumps in its floor. The bumps, as it turns out, constitute about 200 dinosaur footprints from the Jurassic Period, that altogether make up the largest dinosaur trackway in the United Kingdom.
The tracks were made by a bevy of beasts, including large herbivorous sauropods and carnivorous theropods—specifically, the research team believes they were left by the 60-foot-long (18-meter-long) Cetiosaurus and the 29.5-foot-long (9-meter-long) Megalosaurusrespectively. Megalosaurus became the first dinosaur to be scientifically named back in 1824 (that’s right—modern dinosaur research just celebrated its 200th anniversary).
“Scientists have known about and been studying Megalosaurus for longer than any other dinosaur on Earth, and yet these recent discoveries prove there is still new evidence of these animals out there, waiting to be found,” said Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, in a University of Birmingham release.
Dinosaur trackways are tremendously useful to paleontologists even though the fossil remnants don’t involve bones. The footprints are fossilized traces of ancient life as it happened—they can show how many different organisms and individuals occupied a site at a given time, the kind of environment they were traveling through, and the various sizes and ages of the creatures in the area.
The ichnological finds—that is, pertaining to the study of footprints, not of fish (ichthyological)—are a great window into the ancient world, and, when paired with evidence gleaned from fossilized bones, they help tell a more holistic story about life that came before us.
According to the Birmingham release, the footprint “highway” is not the first to be discovered in Oxfordshire. Over 40 sets of fossil footprints were found in a limestone quarry in the area in 1997, revealing aspects of the dinosaurs that lived in what is now England during the Jurassic Period.
However, a lot has changed technologically in nearly 30 years. Paleontologists can catalogue much more information about the trackways than before. The team took over 20,000 images of the prints during the recent excavation, which could provide information about the animals that made the tracks and potential interactions between the animals.
“The preservation is so detailed that we can see how the mud was deformed as the dinosaur’s feet squelched in and out,” said Duncan Murdock, an earth scientist at the Oxford University museum, in the same release. “Along with other fossils like burrows, shells and plants we can bring to life the muddy lagoon environment the dinosaurs walked through.”
Further scrutiny will likely yield details of the Jurassic creatures that crisscrossed the site, but for now the impressive scale of the tracks and the beasts that made them will have to do.
