Approximately 200 dinosaur footprints dating back 166 million years were uncovered by British researchers.

These footprints were made 166 million years ago as a dinosaur walked across a lagoon; Photo: Kevin Church:BBC
These footprints were made 166 million years ago as a dinosaur walked across a lagoon. Photo: Kevin Church/BBC

The discovery, believed to be the biggest in the United Kingdom, was made by teams at Oxfordshire and Birmingham Universities. According to a new BBC documentary titled “Digging for Britain,” which will feature the new discovery, the footprints were uncovered at Dewar’s Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire after a worker named Gary Johnson found “unusual bumps” as he was stripping clay back with a mechanical digger.

“This is one of the most impressive track sites I’ve ever seen, in terms of scale, in terms of the size of the tracks,” said Prof Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontologist from the University of Birmingham, told BBC News. “You can step back in time and get an idea of what it would have been like, these massive creatures just roaming around, going about their own business.”

The site contains five extensive trackways, the longest continuous track extending approximately 500 feet, making it one of the world’s biggest dinosaur track sites.

“The size of the individual tracks and the area that they cover is just huge,” Kirsty Edgar, a professor of micropaleontology at the University of Birmingham who was part of the excavation team, told Live Science in an email. “I’m in awe that I’m standing exactly where some of the largest animals to have existed once stood, and I love trying to think about where they were going, and why.”

Scientists think these distinctive three-toed prints were made by a Megalosaurus; Photo: Emma Nicholls:Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Scientists think a Megalosaurus made these distinctive three-toed prints; Photo: Emma Nicholls/Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Researchers have speculated that four of the five trackways were made by a cetiosaurus, a long-necked herbivorous dinosaur. According to the University of Birmingham, the fifth set of tracks belongs to a nine-meter-long carnivorous megalosaurus identified by its distinct three-toed feet with claws.

Nearly 20,000 photographs of the footprints were taken using aerial drone photography to create detailed 3D models of the site. Studying the footprints further could provide clues about how dinosaurs interacted, their sizes, and the speeds at which they moved.

“Knowing that this one individual dinosaur walked across this surface and left exactly that print is so exhilarating,” the Oxford Museum’s Duncan Murdock told the BBC. “You can sort of imagine it making its way through, pulling its legs out of the mud as it was going.”