Oxfordshire dinosaur footprint trackway ‘longest in world’

Some 200 extra footprints were found last summer on top of what was already discovered in the summer of 2024 at Dewars Farm quarry near Bicester.

Dating back 166 million years, the footprints were buried in the mud of the quarry and found by a team of researchers at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and University of Birmingham.

The week-long dig resulted in hundreds more individual prints from four trackways being identified and documented, each made by sauropod dinosaurs: large, long-necked herbivores such as Cetiosaurus.

Kirsty Edgar, Richard Butler, Duncan Murdock, Alice Roberts and Emma Nicholls with dinosaur footprints found at Dewars Farm Quarry (Image: Emma Nicholls/University of Birmingham/PA Wire)

Excavation lead Emma Nichols, from Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History, said it was the “longest exposed continuous sauropod trackway in the world”.

She told the BBC: “There were four trackways of sauropod footprints and none of them were the same size as each other.

“What that tells us is a possibility of a bunch of different things – it could be that they were all Cetiosaurus and they were moving as a family herd, or as a herd of different aged individuals, not necessarily related.

“Or it could be that we have more than one type of sauropod.”

Calum Miller, the MP for Bicester and Woodstock, joined calls last year to open up the dinosaurs to the public for tourism.

But as Natural England told us, the site is owned by a private operator, Smiths, Bletchingdon and the question of access is at the landowner’s discretion.

Footprints (Image: Emma Nicholls/University of Birmingham)

The landowner said planning obligations mean it is “not an option” for the trackway to remain open and the company is “obliged” for the land to be restored to agricultural use.

Dewars Farm quarry forms part of Ardley Trackways Site of Special Scientific Interest, a designated status since 2010 for its dinosaur trackways.

In 1997, Oxfordshire was host to another major excavation in which a Megalosaurus trackway was discovered.

Megalosaurus are nine metres long and, Ms Nichols said, were “Britain’s answer to the T-Rex”.

Cetiosaurus, meanwhile, had long necks and four legs and could reach about 18 metres in length.

Ms Nichols said the land 166 million years ago in what is now Oxfordshire was a “really lovely tropical, kind of lush environment”.

“Britain was actually underwater, and there was a shallow inland sea covering Oxfordshire – but there was a series of islands – like the Bahamas or Florida Keys – and that’s where the dinosaurs would have been living,” she said.

“So Megalosaurus, Cetiosaurus and other dinosaurs would have been living on these little islands.”