Around 200 footprints dinosaurs166 million years old, were found in Oxfordshire, in the southeast of England, in the largest site of its type discovered in the United Kingdom, the universities of Oxford and Birmingham announced on Thursday.
These impressive footprints left by five dinosaurs will be shown next Wednesday on the archeology program “Digging for Britain”, on BBC Two.
The footprints extend for 150 meters at the Dewars Farm Quarry site, a true “dinosaur highway” where herbivores and carnivores crossed paths during the Middle Jurassic.
“It is rare to find so many footprints in one place, as well as such extensive trails”Emma Nicholls, a paleontologist specializing in vertebrates at the Natural History Museum of the University of Oxford, told AFP.
According to this scientist, this place could also constitute one of the largest sites of dinosaur footprints in the world.
The first footprints were discovered last June by Gary Johnson, a worker who was working in the quarry with an excavator.
“I realized I was the first person to see them, it was surreal,” Johnson told the BBC.
In later days, about 100 people took part in excavations, supervised by the universities of Oxford and Birmingham, at a site that was an ancient shallow warm-water lagoon.
Scientists do not know why these footprints, left in the mud, were preserved in this way but it could be due to “that a storm would deposit sediment on them, which would have helped freeze them”said Richard Butler, paleobiologist at the University of Birmingham.
Four of the five dinosaurs that left their footprints at the site were sauropods, long-necked herbivores, probably of the cetiosaurus species.
The footprints, similar to those of an elephant but much larger, correspond to specimens that measured up to 18 meters long.
The fifth animal to leave footprints was probably a megalosaurus, the largest Jurassic predator in present-day England, which walked on two legs and whose claws can be clearly seen on the ground.