Did dinosaurs ever get into traffic jams?
Hey, Megalosaurus, I’m walkin’ here!
Raar! Get a move on, herbivore.
A worker digging in clay in a southern England limestone quarry noticed unusual bumps. Those led to the discovery of a “dinosaur highway” with nearly 200 fossilized footprints.
A large team from the universities of Oxford and Birmingham excavated the Dewars Farm Quarry site in Oxfordshire in June.
Four sets of tracks show paths taken by gigantic, long-necked, herbivores called sauropods. They are thought to be Cetiosaurus, a dinosaur that grew to nearly 60 feet in length. A fifth set belonged to a Megalosaurus. The ferocious, nearly 30-foot-long predator left a distinctive triple-claw print. It was the first dinosaur to be scientifically named two centuries ago.
“The size of the individual tracks and the area that they cover is just huge,” Kirsty Edgar told Live Science. She is a micropaleontology professor at the University of Birmingham. “I’m standing exactly where some of the largest animals to have existed once stood, and I love trying to think about where they were going, and why.”
An area where the tracks cross raises questions about possible interactions between the two dinosaur types.
“Scientists have known about and been studying Megalosaurus for longer than any other dinosaur on Earth,” says Emma Nicholls. “Yet these recent discoveries prove there is still new evidence of these animals out there, waiting to be found.” Nicholls is a vertebrate paleontologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Nearly 30 years ago, people discovered 40 sets of footprints in another limestone quarry in the area. That was considered one of the world’s most scientifically important dinosaur track sites. But that area is mostly inaccessible now. It predated the use of digital cameras and drones to record the findings. So there’s limited photographic evidence.
That won’t be a problem with this find. The group that worked at the site this summer took more than 20,000 digital images. Researchers used drones to create 3-D models of the prints. The trove of documentation could shed light on the size of the dinosaurs, how they walked, and the speed at which they moved.
“The preservation is so detailed that we can see how the mud was deformed as the dinosaur’s feet squelched in and out,” says Duncan Murdock, an Earth scientist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural Sciences. “Along with other fossils like burrows, shells, and plants, we can bring to life the muddy lagoon environment the dinosaurs walked through.”
Why? No one alive has ever seen a dinosaur. But we can learn about them from what they left behind.
