The dinosaur 'highway'. Photo: Emma Nicholls/University of Birmingham

The dinosaur ‘highway’. Photo: Emma Nicholls/University of Birmingham

The most extensive dinosaur trackways ever discovered in Europe have been uncovered at an Oxfordshire quarry.

A 220-metre trail left by enormous sauropod dinosaurs – the family of herbivorous four-legged animals with long necks and tails – was found at Dewars Farm Quarry, near Bicester, during work to remove limestone.

The track is believed to have been made by a species of sauropod known as Cetiosaurus, which grew up around 16 metres in length and lived about 171 to 165 million years ago in what is now Britain and France.

The team, co-led by Oxford University Museum of Natural History and University of Birmingham, uncovered hundreds of individual footprints traversing the site, with sauropod footprints as well as a few rarer three-toed prints believed to have been made by meat-eating Megalosaurs.

“We’ve been working at this site since 2022 and slowly uncovering more and more of this surface,” Dr Duncan Murdock, from Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History, said.

“This summer we excavated four trackways, the longest of which is 220 metres – with nearly a hundred individual footprints, each of which is nearly a metre long itself – so absolutely huge.

“With that we can work out how big this animal was. Roughly speaking, the height of a hip is about four times the print, so about four metres to the hip, which works out to about 15 or 16 metres long from head to tail, and [weighing] up to 10 tonnes.”

The prints give new clues about how the animals moved, in particular how quickly they were walking.

While there are quite a few sites around the world, including Valentia in Ireland, where dinosaur prints can be found, the site in Oxfordshire is unusual due to its scale.

University of Birmingham palaeontologist Kirsty Edgar said: “It’s so exciting to be able to stand where some of the largest animals that ever lived once walked and imagine what their lives and world looked like. Dinosaur tracks provide us with the opportunity to glimpse into how dinosaurs lived.”