Discovery of a 220-Metre Sauropod Footprint Trail
A remarkable paleontological find has emerged from Dewars Farm Quarry near Bicester, England, where a 220-metre trail of enormous sauropod footprints has been uncovered during limestone removal. The trace, believed to have been made by Cetiosaurus, a long-necked, four-legged herbivore, offers an unprecedented window into the lives of dinosaurs that roamed Britain around 166 million years ago.
The site is yielding hundreds of individual footprints, including the familiar long, rounded sauropod tracks and a handful of rarer three-toed prints that researchers attribute to meat-eating Megalosaurs. The assemblage has surprised scientists with its scale and the clarity of the tracks, which allow a rare glimpse into the anatomy and movement of some of the largest animals to walk the Earth.
A Collaboration That Unearthed a Giant Trail
The dig is a collaborative effort led by Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the University of Birmingham. Dr Duncan Murdock of Oxford’s museum described the painstaking process of revealing the track surface that has lay hidden for millions of years.
“We’ve been working at this site since 2022 and slowly uncovering more and more of this surface,” Murdock said. This summer’s fieldwork produced four distinct trackways, the longest stretching 220 metres and containing nearly a hundred individual footprints, each nearly a metre in length. The sheer size of the prints has allowed researchers to estimate the animal’s posture and proportions more accurately than ever before.
What Cetiosaurus Tells Us About Size and Movement
Based on the footprint dimensions, experts estimate the animal could stand roughly four metres at the hip, with an overall body length of about 15 to 16 metres. The weight is projected at up to ten tonnes, placing Cetiosaurus among the era’s truly giants. The scale of the trackway provides crucial data about gait and movement, including walking speed and stride patterns, that are difficult to infer from bones alone.
“The prints offer a unique lens into how these dinosaurs navigated their world,” explains Kirsty Edgar, a palaeontologist from the University of Birmingham. “Tracking such large animals across a broad surface helps us understand not just their size, but how they behaved, where they moved within their environment, and how often they stopped.”
Richer Clues from Three-Toed Megalosaurs
Among the abundant sauropod tracks lie several three-toed prints attributed to Megalosaurs, meat-eating dinosaurs that coexisted with Cetiosaurus. These rarer imprints enhance the site’s importance, offering a snapshot of a diverse ecosystem where giant herbivores and predatory dinosaurs shared landscapes that once stretched across what is now Britain and parts of France.
Why This Find Stands Out
While dinosaur footprints are found worldwide, the Oxfordshire site stands out for its extraordinary scale and the quality of preservation. The extended surface and abundance of tracks enable researchers to reconstruct a more cohesive picture of a Jurassic world than many other sites can offer. The collaboration between two leading UK institutions also underscores the value of interdisciplinary fieldwork and careful excavation in unlocking paleontological treasures.
Imagining Life 166 Million Years Ago
As scientists stand on the fossil-bearing surface, they gain a visceral sense of how Cetiosaurus and its contemporaries moved through their world. Edgar emphasises the window this trackway provides into daily life for these ancient giants: “It’s so exciting to be able to stand where some of the largest animals that ever lived once walked and imagine what their lives and world looked like. Dinosaur tracks provide us with the opportunity to glimpse into how dinosaurs lived.”
The Oxfordshire find is not simply a record of size; it is a rich narrative of movement, ecology, and interaction within a tropical or subtropical landscape that existed long before modern Britain took its current shape. As excavations continue, researchers hope to add further details about the timing, behavior, and environmental conditions that shaped this extraordinary dinosaur highway.
