Researchers said Thursday that they have discovered a “dinosaur highway” with nearly 200 tracks that are 166 million years old after a worker in a limestone quarry in southern England spotted strange bumps while excavating clay.
Researchers from the universities of Oxford and Birmingham said the remarkable discovery, which was made after a team of over 100 individuals dug up the Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire in June, builds on earlier paleontological studies in the region and provides new information about the Middle Jurassic period.
According to Kirsty Edgar, a professor of micropaleontology at the University of Birmingham, these footprints offer an extraordinary window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing details about their movements, interactions, and the tropical environment they inhabited.
The giant, long-necked herbivores known as sauropods, believed to be the roughly 60-foot (18-meter) long Cetiosaurus, are represented in four of the sets of tracks that comprise the so-called highway. The Megalosaurus, a fierce 9-meter predator that left a characteristic triple-claw print and was the first dinosaur to be given a scientific name two centuries ago, owned a fifth set.
Questions concerning potential interactions between the herbivores and carnivores are raised by a region where the tracks cross.
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