Find hundreds of footprints in the Jurassic “Dinosaur Trail”.

Six months ago, a team of paleontologists examined a quarry in Oxfordshire, England, that had some unusual bumps in its floor. It turns out that the outcrops constitute about 200 dinosaur footprints from the Jurassic period, which together form the largest dinosaur track in the United Kingdom.

The tracks were made by a swarm of monsters, including large herbivorous sauropods and carnivorous theropods — specifically, the research team believes they were left by the 60-foot-long (18-meter-long) dinosaur. Cetosaurus It is 29.5 feet (9 meters) long. Megalosaurusrespectively. Megalosaurus He became the first dinosaur to be created Its name is scientific In 1824 (that’s right, modern dinosaur research has just celebrated its 200th anniversary).

Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of California, said: “Scientists have known about and studied megalosaurs for longer than any other dinosaur on Earth, yet these latest discoveries prove that there is still new evidence of these animals out there, just waiting.” “Find it.” Oxford University Museum of Natural History, at the University of Birmingham He releases.

Dinosaur tracks are very useful to paleontologists even though the fossil remains do not contain bones. Footprints are fossilized traces of Old life as it happened– They can show how many different organisms and individuals occupied a location at a given time, the type of environment they were traveling through, and the different sizes and ages of creatures in the area.

Archaeological finds – that is, the study of footprints, not fish (ichthyology) – are a great window into the ancient world, and when combined with evidence from fossilized bones, they help inform A more comprehensive story About the life that came before us.

According to the Birmingham version, the “highway” fingerprint is not the first to be discovered in Oxfordshire. More than 40 sets of fossil footprints were found in a limestone quarry in the area in 1997, revealing aspects of dinosaurs that lived in what is now England during the Jurassic Period.

However, a lot has changed technologically in nearly 30 years. Paleontologists can catalog much more information about tracks than before. The team captured more than 20,000 images of the prints during the recent excavation, which could provide information about the animals that made the tracks and possible interactions between the animals.

“The preservation process is so detailed that we can see how the clay deformed as the dinosaur’s feet squeezed in and out,” Duncan Murdock, an earth scientist at Oxford University Museum, said in the same statement. “Along with other fossils such as burrows, shells and plants, we can bring back to life the muddy lake environment that dinosaurs experienced.”

Further scrutiny will likely yield details of the Jurassic creatures that criss-crossed the site, but for now the impressive size of the ruins and the monsters that created them will have to do.