Dinosaurs are cool. Little kids love them – I did, and do today, just as much. My grandson Bubba does, too, and we have spent many hours bonding over dinosaur videos. So when a new discovery comes out, it’s fun to read all about it.
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A recent discovery in the United Kingdom, though, is different in a way that many folks might not think of at first. That’s because these are not dino-bones or other fossilized remains – these are footprints.
A worker digging up clay in a southern England limestone quarry noticed unusual bumps that led to the discovery of a “dinosaur highway” and nearly 200 tracks that date back 166 million years, researchers said Thursday.
The extraordinary find made after a team of more than 100 people excavated the Dewars Farm Quarry, in Oxfordshire, in June expands upon previous paleontology work in the area and offers greater insights into the Middle Jurassic period, researchers at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham said.
The Jurassic was mid-stream in the Mesozoic and something of a dino heyday. This was the time when gigantic sauropods, some weighing 80-90 tons and measuring almost a hundred feet long, wandered the land in herds. It would have been an amazing time to see – and that’s when these tracks were made. The AP story linked above continued:
“These footprints offer an extraordinary window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing details about their movements, interactions, and the tropical environment they inhabited,” said Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontology professor at the University of Birmingham.
Four of the sets of tracks that make up the so-called highway show paths taken by gigantic, long-necked, herbivores called sauropods, thought to be Cetiosaurus, a dinosaur that grew to nearly 60 feet (18 meters) in length. A fifth set belonged to the Megalosaurus, a ferocious 9-meter predator that left a distinctive triple-claw print and was the first dinosaur to be scientifically named two centuries ago.
An area where the tracks cross raises questions about possible interactions between the carnivores and herbivores.
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Interactions – that’s the key.
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Trackways like this, you see, are neat because they are evidence of behavior. Bones can tell us a lot, and some extraordinary dino-fossils even preserve skin impressions and impressions left by long-gone soft tissues. But tracks are different; this is evidence that an animal walked in a certain area. It can give us an idea of how quickly it moved, by the length of the stride. If there are tracks of both a herbivore and a carnivore, as is the case here, it might even show evidence of an attack.
Dinosaurs were one of the most successful forms of life ever to walk on this planet. They were dominant for 200 million years, from the mid-Triassic to the asteroid strike that ended the Cretaceous. There were probably hundreds of thousands of species during that span of time, and some of them were the largest creatures to ever walk on dry land. Some are famous due to their charisma, like the incredible and mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex. Some are famous due to their mass, like the Titanosaurs.
The big ones are now long gone, which makes it even neater when we find evidence like this, that gives us just a little look back into the distant past, when we can see those tracks and realize that an animal walked here, and left these trackways behind.
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And the greatest thing about dinosaurs, and about the enormous time in which they lived? They aren’t gone. They aren’t extinct. Not all of them. There are more species of dinosaurs alive today than there are mammals.
We call them birds.
