The largest in the UK. This is the adjective used by the BBC to describe the paleontological site located in Oxfordshire, a county east of London, discovered during the summer of 2024. In fact, no less than 200 dinosaur footprints dating from the Jurassic have been found, allowing us to get an idea of the ecosystem of this now bygone era.
The excavations will be presented on the show Digging for Britain on BBC Two at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 8. The full series will be available on BBC iPlayer on January 7.
A discovery made on board an excavator
Chance often does things well. Indeed, this discovery, like many others before it, was made completely by chance. It is on board his excavator that a worker in the quarry Dewars Farm Quarry found dinosaur footprints.
“I was shoveling clay and came across a bump and thought it was just an anomaly in the ground. Then 3 meters later, a new bump and so on.” he declared to the BBC.
A moment that the worker will not soon forget. “I figured I was the first person to see them. And it was so surreal, like a thrill” he explained to the British media. In summer 2024, during excavations, researchers were able to uncover five different types of footprints, four made by herbivores and one by a carnivore.
Who did these dinosaur footprints belong to?
Obviously, after the excitement of the discovery, paleontologists looked into the question that everyone was asking, namely which dinosaurs left their footprints in what is now England, 166 million years ago .
And for researchers, the dinosaurs responsible for these footprints were among the largest specimens found in the United Kingdom. Indeed, to determine their belonging to a particular group, they just had to turn their gaze towards the ground.
Several footprints closely resembled those left by elephants as they passed by, so the dinosaurs that left them were sauropods, quadrupedal herbivorous dinosaurs. Others, on the other hand, showed traces of three fingers, “almost a caricature of a dinosaur footprint” laughed Dr. Emma Nichols, a paleontologist from theOxford University Museum of Natural History, at the microphone of the BBC. These were left by a species called theropod. These dinosaurs were bipedal and were primarily carnivores.
In detail, the researchers think that it was a question of Cetiosaurusa long-necked herbivore measuring 18 meters long, and Megalosaurusa carnivore whose size is estimated between 6 and 9 meters long. He was also one of the “largest predatory Jurassic dinosaurs found in Britain” explained Doctor Emma Nichols to the British media.
Get a clear idea of the Jurassic ecosystem
Little by little, the discoveries we are making about dinosaurs are making it possible to paint an increasingly vague picture of what life must have been like several tens of millions of years ago.
And the site found in Oxfordshire has everything to be one of the most important for gaining an idea of the Jurassic ecosystem.
“This is one of the most impressive footprint sites I have ever seen, in terms of scale and sizes of the footprints. You can go back in time and get an idea of what these huge creatures must have been like as they walked around and went about their business” enthused Professor Kirsty Edgar, a specialist in micropalaeontology at the University of Birmingham, in comments reported by the BBC.
Source : BBC
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