Gigantic Jurassic Dinosaur Trackway Unearthed in UK Quarry

In a limestone quarry in Oxfordshire, England, an extraordinary window into the distant past has opened, one that stretches back about 166 million years to the Middle Jurassic Period when dinosaurs roamed what is now southern Britain.

Paleontologists have uncovered an extensive series of footprints, a dinosaur “highway,” that reveals not just the presence of these ancient beasts, but their movements, behaviours and interactions. It is one of the largest discoveries of its kind ever found in the United Kingdom.

A Quarry Worker’s Curiosity Leads to Discovery

The remarkable discovery began with a moment of curiosity. Quarry worker Gary Johnson was stripping clay at Dewars Farm Quarry near Bicester when he felt unusual bumps beneath his digger’s blade, rhythmic, repeated raised ridges that didn’t match typical rock formations. Recognizing that something might be fossilized beneath the limestone surface, he stopped work and called in experts.


That decision triggered a week‑long excavation in June 2024, bringing together a team of more than 100 scientists, students and volunteers from the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham, supported by others including Liverpool John Moores University and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Their mission: to carefully document and preserve an astonishing record of dinosaur footsteps.

Footprints That Stretch Across Time

Working with quarry staff led by Manager Mark Stanway, the team painstakingly exposed around 200 footprints preserved in mud that was once part of a shallow coastal plain. Using aerial drones and detailed 3D modelling, they captured over 20,000 images of the site to record the tracks in unprecedented detail.

These impressions form five extensive trackways, with the longest continuous series of footprints exceeding 150 metres (about 492 feet). In a continued excavation later in 2025, one trackway, believed to be made by a single animal, extended roughly 220 metres, making it Europe’s longest sauropod trackway discovered to date.

Giants of the Jurassic Step Into View

The footprints belong to at least two very different types of dinosaurs that once moved through this ancient landscape:

• Sauropods — massive, long‑necked, plant‑eating dinosaurs up to 18 metres (about 60 feet) long, likely Cetiosaurus or a close relative, left the four‑legged impressions that dominate most of the site.
• Megalosaurus, a nine‑metre (about 30 feet) long carnivorous theropod, made the three‑toed tracks documented in the fifth trail. These prints show sharp toe marks where claws dug into the soft mud.

Scientists are particularly excited because some trails cross over one another, suggesting that herbivores and their predators passed through the same area, offering rare evidence of ancient animal interaction on a detailed timescale.

A Living Landscape Preserved in Stone

Professor Kirsty Edgar, Professor of Micropalaeontology at the University of Birmingham and one of the lead researchers, emphasized the scientific value of the find. “These footprints offer an **extraordinary window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing details about their movements, interactions, and the tropical environment they inhabited,” she said, describing the trackways uncovered so far.

Unlike bones, which reveal anatomy, footprints capture behavior in motion: how an animal walked, how fast it may have been moving, the stance it used, and potentially even how it responded to terrain. “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,” paleobiologist Professor Richard Butler of the University of Birmingham told reporters last year. “You can learn things about how that animal moved.”

Why These Tracks Survived

It takes exceptional conditions for footprints to be preserved for millions of years. According to researchers, fine mudflats near ancient shorelines, combined with rapid burial by sediment soon after the tracks were made, helped imprint and protect these marks from erosion. Over time, mineralization solidified the impressions, turning them into fossils.

The site connects to earlier discoveries in the area, including footprints found in the late 1990s at neighboring locations. But the scale and clarity of the 2024–25 finds are remarkable, in part because modern tools such as drone imaging and 3D mapping allow scientists to record and interpret the trackways far more comprehensively than previous generations could.

From Jurassic Footsteps to Modern Insights

Beyond its allure as a record of ancient giants, this trackway offers scientists a way to probe how dinosaurs interacted with their environment and with each other. Every footprint, whether from a lumbering herbivore or an agile predator, is a moment in time frozen in stone, a testament to lives lived on a world very different from ours. As paleontologists continue their work and more of the site is exposed and documented, the dinosaur “highway” at Dewars Farm Quarry may yet yield even deeper insights into the behaviour, ecology, and daily journeys of Jurassic megafauna.