Scientists Find Largest Dinosaur Footprint Site Ever Found in the U.K. — Here’s Why It’s ‘Exhilarating’

Scientists have found the U.K.’s largest dinosaur footprint site ever.

The tracks were discovered in a quarry in Oxfordshire — about 60 miles northwest of London — by quarry employee Gary Johnson, according to BBC News.

"I was basically clearing the clay, and I hit a hump, and I thought it's just an abnormality in the ground," Johnson told the outlet. “But then it got to another, 3 [meters] along, and it was a hump again. And then it went another 3 [meter] hump again,” he added.

“I thought, ‘I'm the first person to see them.’ And it was so surreal — a bit of a tingling moment, really,” he continued.

According to the University of Birmingham, the tracks date back to around 166 million years ago during the Middle Jurassic Period.

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After the tracks were discovered, more than 100 scientists, students and volunteers joined in an excavation effort.

The teams ultimately found five different tracks, four of which are thought to belong to the long-necked plant-eating dinosaur known as Cetiosaurus, which measured almost 60 feet in length, according to the U.K.’s Natural History Museum. The fifth set of tracks likely belonged to the smaller carnivorous Megalosaurus, which the museum stated measured about 20 ft.

The site extends 150 meters (around 500 feet) and includes approximately 200 giant footprints, according to the BBC — though the outlet notes that the tracks could extend even further into areas that have not yet been excavated.

"This is one of the most impressive track sites I've ever seen, in terms of scale, in terms of the size of the tracks," micropalaeontologist Kirsty Edgar, a professor at the University of Birmingham, told the BBC.

"You can step back in time and get an idea of what it would have been like, these massive creatures just roaming around, going about their own business,” she added.

As to how the tracks were kept so well intact?

Related: Baby Dinosaur Discovered Coiled Inside 70-Million-Year-Old Fossilized Egg

"Something must have happened to preserve these in the fossil record," paleobiologist Richard Butler told the outlet. "We don't know exactly what, but it might be that there was a storm event that came in, deposited a load of sediments on top of the footprints, and meant that they were preserved rather than just being washed away.”

"The really lovely thing about a dinosaur footprint, particularly if you have a trackway, is that it is a snapshot in the life of the animal," he continued. "You can learn things about how that animal moved. You can learn exactly what the environment that it was living in was like. So tracks give us a whole different set of information that you can't get from the bone fossil record."

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Dr. Duncan Murdock of Oxford University has called the discovery “exhilarating.”

"You can sort of imagine it [the dinosaur] making its way through, pulling its legs out of the mud as it was going,” he said in an interview in the same BBC piece.

Scientists are working with Smiths Bletchington, the company that operates the quarry, as well as Natural England, a government advisory organization, on the best way to preserve the site going forward, per the BBC.

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