It started with one set of tracks spotted by a worker at Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire. Four years later, scientists say the site holds hundreds of dinosaur footprints and what may be the comings and goings of Cetiosaurus.
Dr Emma Nichols, from Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History, led the excavation and said it was the “longest exposed continuous sauropod trackway in the world”.
She said there were four trackways of sauropod footprints at the site.
“There were four trackways of sauropod footprints and none of them were the same size as each other,” she said.
“What that tells us is a possibility of a bunch of different things, it could be that they were all Cetiosaurus and they were moving as a family herd, or as a herd of different aged individuals, not necessarily related.
“Or it could be that we have more than one type of sauropod.”
Cetiosaurus was a four-legged, long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur that could reach about 18 metres in length.
Nichols said another major find linked to the site came in 1997.
“In 1997, at the first major excavation that is connected to the ones that we’ve been doing more recently, something really incredible was discovered, which is a Megalosaurus trackway,” she said.
“The land in Oxfordshire would have been ruled by Megalosaurus, they were nine metres long and were Britain’s answer to T-Rex.”
Nichols said that 166 million years ago, the area around the tracks would have been “a really lovely tropical, kind of lush environment”.
“Britain was actually underwater, and there was a shallow inland sea covering Oxfordshire, but there was a series of islands, like the Bahamas or Florida Keys, and that’s where the dinosaurs would have been living,” she said.
“So Megalosaurus, Cetiosaurus and other dinosaurs would have been living on these little islands.”
One part of the site shows where the paths of a sauropod and a Megalosaurus crossed on the “same bedding plane”, according to Nichols.
She said all of the recently excavated footprints were evenly spaced except for one print that sat out of line with the others.
Nichols suggested this showed the sauropod had stopped and leant on one leg for a moment “as if it’s looking back over its left shoulder”.
“There might be lots of reasons why the animal would do that, and of course we weren’t there 166 million years ago,” she said.
“But depending on where in time the Megalosaurus is on that trackway at the point where the sauropod put its foot down, it could very easily be explained by Megalosaurus coming up behind it.”
She said the sauropod would have been “too big” for a Megalosaurus to hunt, but the predator may have been “tracking the herd” if smaller animals were nearby.
The future of the trackway has not yet been decided. Scientists are working with Smiths Bletchington, which operates the quarry, and Natural England on options to preserve the site.
They also believe there could be more footprints at the site.
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