There are plenty of reasons to get excited about the dinosaur footprints whose discovery was announced last week. They will bring new knowledge to the Jurassic world of more than 150 million years ago. Their recording brought together career workers and more than a hundred scientists, students and other volunteers in a wild week of work in the field. But there was something else to the images of long, winding paths crossing a stony plain in the Oxfordshire countryside. It seemed to me that great beasts had passed that way, not in the distant past, but a few days before. I will never be able to shake the idea that they are alive now, somewhere. Who knew the Cotswolds were home to dinosaurs?
Smiths Bletchington limestone quarries have been revealing footprints for decades. The best was in 1997, at what is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest, Ardley Quarry: more than 40 sets, with tracks up to 180 meters long. Ardley’s discoveries, made before digital recording, are difficult to study today. But when the University of Oxford Museum of Natural History heard about a nearby discovery in late 2023, it had high hopes. New technologies – notably photogrammetry and drone photography – have made it possible to capture everything important in detail, share it with scientists around the world and preserve it for posterity, whatever the fate of the prints. Palaeontologists from the museum and the universities of Birmingham and Oxford quickly confirmed that the Dewars Farm quarry, a few miles from Ardley, was an important site. They carried out excavations last summer.
They discovered a vast expanse of Middle Jurassic landscape, part of what was a muddy lagoon near a seashore under warm, tropical skies 166 million years ago. Burrows, shells and fossil plants will help scientists imagine the environment that was home to long-necked sauropods up to 18 meters long, as well as a smaller carnivorous megalosaur.
Sauropod footprints vary in size, suggesting a herd of juveniles or a mix of small and large herbivores. One of their four titles is missing two copies; something must have prevented the feet from sinking into the mud. Further on, the animal stopped, one foot missing a full step. Had he turned around and frozen to look at a Megalosaurus? The single track of this carnivore crosses that of its potential prey – and one of its legs has crushed a sauropod footprint. Such details, and others to come as research progresses, make this a discovery of worldwide interest.
The longest track at Dewars Farm is over 150 meters long. Richard Butler, professor of paleobiology at the University of Birmingham and one of the project directors, told me that it would have taken the sauropod, probably a Cetiosaur, about two minutes to move its two tonnes on similar large legs. to those of an elephant. The trail appears and disappears at opposite ends of the searched area. I imagine the dinosaur crossing the lagoon, lowering its legs with measured steps into the wet, sticky mud. I hear the sucking sound as he lifts them, creating waves of mud in front of the prints.
Fossil bones reveal a lot about dead animals and make great exhibits. The dinosaurs that left their footprints in Oxfordshire were alive. Who knows where they went?
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