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Europe|Quarry Workers Find Dinosaur Footprints in ‘Snapshot’ of Jurassic Britain
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/world/europe/dinosaur-footprints-quarry-uk.html
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The prints were made by both long-necked sauropods and a predator, megalosaurus, and were found in one of the largest discoveries in decades.
Jan. 3, 2025, 12:24 p.m. ET
Quarry workers in England have discovered the clawed footprints of a 30-foot-tall predator and the sunken tracks of other dinosaurs, paleontologists said on Friday, in what they called one of the most significant finds in Britain in nearly three decades.
A trail of five distinct prints were uncovered in a quarry in Oxfordshire, about 60 miles northwest of London. The prints, excavated last summer and announced to the public this week, belong to both herbivores and carnivores that roamed the area during the Middle Jurassic period, around 166 million years ago.
Rather than the grasslands that blanket the area today, Jurassic Oxfordshire more resembled the Florida Keys, humid with lagoons and muddy swamps — prime territory for dinosaur feet to sink into the ground.
The area, first excavated in 1997, had already become known among paleontologists as the “dinosaur highway.” Scientists have found more than 40 sets of footprints across nearly 200 yards of pathways. The new tracks expand it into one of the largest sites of dinosaur discoveries in the world, said Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist and collections manager at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
“These recent discoveries prove there is still new evidence of these animals out there, waiting to be found,” Ms. Nicholls said.
At first, the quarry workers did not think much of the abnormality they found while clearing clay in late 2023. The first trace of a dinosaur was just a hump in the ground, said Mark Stanway, who manages the quarry.
