There are many reasons to be excited about the dinosaur footprints whose discovery was announced last week. They will bring new understandings to the Jurassic world of more than 150m years ago. Their recording united quarry workers and more than a hundred scientists, students and other volunteers in a frenzied week of fieldwork. But there was something else in the images of long, winding trails across a stony plain in the Oxfordshire countryside. It looked to me as if great beasts had lumbered by, not in the distant past but just a few days before. I will never be able to rid my mind of the thought that they are alive now, out there somewhere. Who knew the Cotswolds were home to dinosaurs?
Smiths Bletchington’s limestone quarries have been turning up footprints for decades. The best came in 1997, at what is now a site of special scientific interest, in Ardley quarry: more than 40 sets, with trackways up to 180 metres long. The Ardley finds, made before digital recording, are hard to study today. But when the Oxford University Museum of Natural History heard of a nearby discovery late in 2023, it had high hopes. New technologies – including photogrammetry and drone photography – meant that anything of significance could be captured in detail, shared with scientists around the world and saved for posterity, whatever the fate of the actual prints. Palaeontologists from the museum and the universities of Birmingham and Oxford soon confirmed that Dewars Farm Quarry, a couple of miles from Ardley, was an important site. They mounted a dig last summer.
They found a large patch of Middle Jurassic landscape, part of what had been a muddy lagoon near a seashore under warm, tropical skies 166m years ago. Fossil burrows, shells and plants will help the scientists imagine the environment that supported long-necked sauropods up to 18 metres long, and a smaller, carnivorous Megalosaurus.
The sauropod prints vary in size, suggesting a herd with juveniles or a mix of small and large herbivores. One of their four tracks is missing two prints; something must have stopped feet sinking into the mud. Further on, the animal paused, one foot falling short of a full pace. Had it turned and frozen to watch a Megalosaurus? The single track of that carnivore crosses that of its potential prey – and one of its feet squashed a sauropod print. Such details, and more to come as research proceeds, make this a find of global interest.
The longest track at Dewars Farm runs for more than 150 metres. Richard Butler, a professor of palaeobiology at the University of Birmingham and one of the project directors, told me this would have taken the sauropod, probably a Cetiosaurus, about two minutes, moving its two tonnes forward on fat, elephant-like legs. The track appears and disappears at opposite ends of the excavated area. I imagine the dinosaur crossing the lagoon, lowering its feet in measured steps into the wet, sticky mud. I hear the sucking sound as it raises them, creating waves of sludge ahead of the prints.
Fossil bones reveal much about dead animals, and make great exhibits. The dinosaurs that left footprints in Oxfordshire were alive. Who knows where they went?
• Mike Pitts is a writer and archaeologist
