LONDON: British researchers have unearthed nearly 200 dinosaur footprints dating back 166 million years, believed to be the largest in Britain.
According to a new BBC documentary, teams from the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham made an “exciting” discovery at a mine in Oxfordshire in central England when a worker suffered an “unusual collision” when he was carrying a was retrieving soil with a mechanical digger.
The site has five extensive trackways, with the longest continuous track being over 150 meters in length.
Four of the five trackways exposed are believed to have been made by a long-necked herbivorous dinosaur, most likely a satyrosaurus.
According to the University of Birmingham, the fifth set of tracks is likely that of the nine-metre-long carnivore Megalosaurus known for its distinctive three-toed feet.
“It’s rare to find them in such large numbers in one place and even rarer to find such extensive trackways,” Emma Nicholls of Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History told AFP.
He added that the area could become one of the largest dinosaur track sites in the world.
The discovery will be featured in the BBC television documentary “Digging for Britain”, which will be broadcast on January 8.
A 100-strong team led by academics from Oxford and Birmingham excavated the tracks during a week-long dig in June. The new footprints follow a smaller discovery in the area in 1997, when 40 sets were uncovered during limestone quarrying, some of the trackways up to 180 meters long.
The researchers took 20,000 photographs of the most recent footprints and created detailed 3D models of the site using aerial drone photography.
The discovery is expected to provide clues about how dinosaurs communicated, as well as their size and the speed at which they moved.
“To know that this one individual dinosaur went to that level and left exactly the same print is very exciting,” Duncan Murdoch of the Oxford Museum told the BBC.