The UK's biggest ever dinosaur trackway site has been discovered in a quarry in Oxfordshire.
About 200 huge footprints, which were made 166 million years ago, criss-cross the limestone floor. They reveal the comings and goings of two different types of dinosaurs that are thought to be a long-necked sauropod called Cetiosaurus and the smaller meat-eating Megalosaurus.
The longest trackways are 150m in length, but they could extend much further as only part of the quarry has been excavated. "This is one of the most impressive track sites I've ever seen, in terms of scale, in terms of the size of the tracks," said Prof Kirsty Edgar, a micropalaeontologist from the University of Birmingham.
"You can step back in time and get an idea of what it would have been like, these massive creatures just roaming around, going about their own business."
The environment they lived in was covered by a warm, shallow lagoon and the dinosaurs left their prints as they ambled across the mud. "Something must have happened to preserve these in the fossil record," said Prof Richard Butler, a palaeobiologist from the University of Birmingham.
"We don't know exactly what, but it might be that there was a storm event that came in, deposited a load of sediments on top of the footprints, and meant that they were preserved rather than just being washed away."
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