Hear more about new dinosaur trackway discovery in Oxfordshire
‘Live-streamed’ talk to be held at Oxford University Museum of Natural History on 30 January
DINOSAUR footprints unearthed at Smiths Bletchington’s Dewars Farm Quarry, in Oxfordshire, in 2023 have shed more light on the lives of dinosaurs 166 million years ago during the Middle Jurassic period. The discovery includes some of the most extensive and detailed dinosaur footprints uncovered in the UK in more than 25 years, offering fascinating insights into the prehistoric giants and the environment they inhabited.
The new tracks build on Oxfordshire’s rich dinosaur heritage. In the late 1990s, Ardley Quarry, near Bicester, revealed more than 40 trackways of sauropod and theropod dinosaurs, some stretching over 180m.
In 2023, a quarry worker at Dewars Farm spotted unusual patterns in the limestone, triggering an excavation in 2024 that uncovered five trackways of incredible detail and length. Stretching up to 150m, the tracks offer unprecedented insights into dinosaur locomotion and behaviour.
The footprints reveal the presence of two species:
Megalosaurus – the world’s first scientifically named dinosaur, discovered in Oxfordshire in 1824. Measuring up to 9m long and weighing more than 2 tonnes, this fearsome predator left tracks 65cm in length, with a stride length of 2.7m.
Sauropods – towering herbivores like Cetiosaurus, which reached 18m in length and weighed more than 10 tonnes. Their tracks, measuring around 90cm, suggest a leisurely walking speed of 5km/h.
These discoveries also offer a glimpse into the Middle Jurassic world, when Oxfordshire was a tropical landscape of mudflats and shallow lagoons. The preserved footprints capture remarkable details, including the squelching deformation of the mud under the dinosaurs’ weight.
Excavations in June 2024 brought together more than 100 scientists, students, and volunteers from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Oxford University, and the University of Birmingham. Supported by Smiths Bletchington, this collaborative effort used cutting-edge technology to create more than 20,000 images, forming 3D models of the site and individual prints, and allowing researchers to study the dinosaurs’ movements, size, speed, and interactions with unparalleled precision.
In a unique showcase, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History’s ‘Breaking Ground’ exhibition, supported by Smiths Bletchington, brings together Megalosaurus fossils, high-resolution images, and 3D models of the tracks. As part of this exhibition, a ‘live-streamed’ talk by Dr Emma Nicholls FGS and Dr Duncan Murdoch, who co-led the excavation of the trackways at Dewars Farm Quarry, is being held at the museum on 30 January 2025 at 6pm. For more information click here.
