Hundreds of footprints found on Jurassic ‘Dinosaur Highway’

Six months ago, a team of paleontologists investigated a quarry in Oxfordshire, England, which had some unusual artifacts on its floor. The bumps, as it turns out, make up around 200 dinosaur footprints from the Jurassic Period, which in total make up the largest dinosaur track in the UK.

The tracks were made by a herd 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 feet long (9 meters long) Megalosaurusrespectively. Megalosaurus became the first dinosaur to exist called scientifically back in 1824 (that’s right – modern dinosaur research celebrated its 200th anniversary).

“Scientists have known and studied Megalosaurus for longer than any other dinosaur on Earth, and yet these recent discoveries prove that there is still new evidence of these animals, waiting to be found,” said Emma Nicholls, paleontologist of vertebrates in the University department. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, in a University of Birmingham liberation.

Dinosaur tracks are tremendously useful to paleontologists even if the fossil remains do not involve bones. Footprints are fossil traces of ancient life as it happened– they can show how many different organisms and individuals occupied a site at a given time, the type of environment they traveled in, and the different sizes and ages of the creatures in the area.

Ichnological discoveries – that is, related to the study of footprints, not fish (ichthyological) – are a great window into the ancient world, and, when combined with evidence gathered from fossil bones, help to tell more holistic history about the life that came before us.

According to the Birmingham book, the ‘highway’ footprint is not the first discovery in Oxfordshire. More than 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, much has changed technologically in almost 30 years. Paleontologists can catalog much more information about tracks than before. The team took more than 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 University of Oxford museum, in the same version. “Together with other fossils such as burrows, shells and plants, we can bring the muddy lagoon environment to life through dinosaurs.”

Further scrutiny will likely yield details of the Jurassic creatures that roamed the site, but for now the sheer scale of the tracks and the beasts that made them will have to do.