Jurassic dinosaur footprints found in Oxfordshire quarry

The most extensive dinosaur trackways ever discovered in Europe have been uncovered at an Oxfordshire quarry, and delighted palaeontologists have now gained new insights into how the animals moved through the landscape.

- HARRY COCKBURN

A 220m trail left by enormous sauropod dinosaurs – herbivorous quadrupeds with long necks and tails – was found at Dewars Farm Quarry, near Bicester, during work to extract limestone.

The tracks are believed to have been made by a species of sauropod known as Cetiosaurus, which grew up to around 16m in length and lived in the Middle Jurassic period, between 171 and 165 million years ago, in what is now Britain and France.

The team, from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the University of Birmingham, uncovered hundreds of individual footprints traversing the site, with sauropod footprints as well as a few rarer three-toed prints believed to have been made by carnivorous megalosaurs.

“We’ve been working at this site since 2022 and slowly uncovering more and more of this surface,” Duncan Murdock, from Oxford’s Museum of Natural History, told The Independent.