What is the ‘dinosaur highway’? Premium

Discover the "dinosaur highway" in an Oxfordshire limestone quarry with over 200 footprints from the Jurassic period.

A limestone quarry in Oxfordshire in the UK has come to be called a “dinosaur highway” for the number of footprints of the long-lost giants scientists have discovered there.

In 1997, workers at the Dewars Farm Quarry revealed more than two score dinosaur footprints, some of them extending for more than 180 metres. Further studies revealed the footprints were from the Jurassic period.

Recently, on January 4, a team of more than a hundred scientists from the University of Birmingham and the University of Oxford announced the discovery of more than 200 footprints in the same quarry. In June last year, a quarry worker had stumbled upon “unusual bumps”, as he called them, when he was digging for clay. After he reported them, the scientists got together and found that the footprints were from 166 million years ago – the Middle Jurassic period.

The team found five trackways — or series of footprints — in all. They said four of them were created by sauropods (long-necked herbivores) called cetiosaurus and one by a carnivore called megalosaurus. Analysis by the team suggested all the animals had been walking, not running, at the times the prints were made. The sauropod footprints vary in size, suggesting they were a herd of adults and juveniles moving together. One sauropod footprint seems to have stopped abruptly, perhaps to look back at the megalosaurus whose presence it sensed.

The megalosaurus footprint is particularly serendipitous because 2024 was the 100th year of its study. In 1824, a megalosaurus fossil became the first dinosaur fossil to be unearthed and examined in detail, setting the stage for the modern study of these ancient reptiles, by the British theologian and geologist William Buckland.