'Dinosaur highway' uncovered in England dating back 166 million years

A worker digging up clay in a southern England limestone quarry noticed unusual bumps that led to the discovery of a "dinosaur highway" and nearly 200 tracks that date back 166 million years, researchers said Thursday.

The extraordinary find made after a team of more than 100 people excavated the Dewars Farm Quarry, in Oxfordshire, in June 2024 expands upon previous paleontology work in the area and offers greater insights into the Middle Jurassic period, researchers at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham said.

"These footprints offer an extraordinary window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing details about their movements, interactions, and the tropical environment they inhabited," said Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontology professor at the University of Birmingham.

Four of the sets of tracks that make up the so-called highway show paths taken by gigantic, long-necked, herbivores called sauropods, thought to be Cetiosaurus, a dinosaur that grew to nearly 18 metres in length. A fifth set belonged to the Megalosaurus, a ferocious nine-metre predator that left a distinctive triple-claw print and was the first dinosaur to be scientifically named two centuries ago.

"When we have footprints ... we have a snapshot, a moment in the life of an animal. And we can see that animal walking across a surface, so we can understand exactly what the environment in which that animal lived was like," said Richard Butler, paleobiologist at the University of Birmingham, speaking to CBC's As It Happens guest host Stephanie Skenderis. 

"We can also understand things like how it was walking, how fast it was walking. Potentially when we have somewhere like this site where we have lots of different trackways, we might start to understand something about behaviour." 

An area where the tracks cross raises questions about possible interactions between the carnivores and herbivores.

"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.

Nearly 30 years ago, 40 sets of footprints discovered in a limestone quarry in the area were considered one of the world's most scientifically important dinosaur track sites. But that area is mostly inaccessible now and there's limited photographic evidence because it predated the use of digital cameras and drones to record the findings.

The group that worked at the site last summer took more than 20,000 digital images and used drones to create 3D models of the prints. The trove of documentation will aid future studies and could shed light on the size of the dinosaurs, how they walked and the speed at which they moved.

"[If] you walk along the beach yourself today and leave footprints behind you, they're going to be gone by the end of the day," Butler said. 

"But, of course, what happened in this case was something unusual. Probably a large storm came and dumped a whole load of sediments over the top of the footprints soon after they formed, and that buried them and that allowed them to be preserved. And that is the kind of thing that might only happen once every thousand years."

The findings will be shown at a new exhibit at the museum and also broadcast on the BBC's Digging for Britain program next week.