'Dinosaur highway' uncovered in England dating back 166 million years – Dunya News
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‘Dinosaur highway’ uncovered in England dating back 166 million years
‘Dinosaur highway’ uncovered in England dating back 166 million years
(Web Desk) – A worker digging up clay in a southern England limestone quarry noticed unusual bumps that led to the discovery of a "dinosaur highway" and nearly 200 tracks that date back 166 million years, researchers said Thursday.
The extraordinary find made after a team of more than 100 people excavated the Dewars Farm Quarry, in Oxfordshire, in June 2024 expands upon previous paleontology work in the area and offers greater insights into the Middle Jurassic period, researchers at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham said.
"These footprints offer an extraordinary window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing details about their movements, interactions, and the tropical environment they inhabited," said Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontology professor at the University of Birmingham.
Four of the sets of tracks that make up the so-called highway show paths taken by gigantic, long-necked, herbivores called sauropods, thought to be Cetiosaurus, a dinosaur that grew to nearly 18 metres in length.
A fifth set belonged to the Megalosaurus, a ferocious nine-metre predator that left a distinctive triple-claw print and was the first dinosaur to be scientifically named two centuries ago.
Dinosaur footprint in dirt with bucket
"When we have footprints … we have a snapshot, a moment in the life of an animal. And we can see that animal walking across a surface, so we can understand exactly what the environment in which that animal lived was like," said Richard Butler, paleobiologist at the University of Birmingham, speaking to CBC's As It Happens guest host Stephanie Skenderis.
"We can also understand things like how it was walking, how fast it was walking. Potentially when we have somewhere like this site where we have lots of different trackways, we might start to understand something about behaviour."
