Well-preserved dinosaur footprints. “You can go back in time”

The tracks were left 166 million years ago by five dinosaurs and were discovered at the Dewars Farm quarry. Some of the paths where the prints were discovered stretch for 150 meters. According to scientists, this place is a “real dinosaur highway” because in the Middle Jurassic period, the paths of herbivores and carnivores crossed there.

“It's very rare to find traces in such large numbers in one place and over such a large area,” said Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Oxford's Natural History Museum. In her opinion, it may also be one of the largest places of this type in the world.

“You can go back in time and imagine what it was like when these huge creatures roamed,” said Kirsty Edgar from the University of Birmingham, who specializes in micropaleontology.

The first traces were discovered in June by Gary Johnson, an excavator operator at a quarry owned by Smiths Bletchington. – I realized I was the first person to see them. It was unreal, he said in an interview with the BBC. Over the following days, approximately 100 people took part in excavations supervised by the universities of Oxford and Birmingham.

According to Richard Butler of the University of Birmingham, the traces in the fossilized mud were helped by a sudden frost, which preserved the prints.

The four dinosaurs that left traces were sauropods, long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs that could grow to be up to 18 meters long. Their prints resemble those of an elephant, but are much larger.

The fifth dinosaur is probably Megalosaurus, the largest predator of the Jurassic period in England, which walked on two legs and whose three claws are clearly impressed in the ground.

As AFP writes, in 1997, another site with about 40 dinosaur traces was discovered in the same area, but it is currently not available and the information collected at that time has not been made public.