The Long Walk: Unearthing a Dinosaur's 220-Meter Stroll Through Ancient Oxfordshire
- MM24 News Desk
- Oct 17
- 3 min read
Close your eyes and picture the scene. The air is thick and humid, the landscape a vast, muddy plain crisscrossed by shallow waterways. Suddenly, the ground begins to shudder. A creature of almost unimaginable size, its neck stretching towards the treetops and its legs like pillars, is on the move. Each footfall sinks deep into the soft earth, leaving a crater-like impression that will, against all odds, remain for millennia. This isn't a scene from a blockbuster movie; it’s the real-life story being pieced together by archaeologists in a quarry near Bicester, who have just uncovered the longest single sauropod trackway ever found in Europe.
This incredible discovery is the latest chapter from what has been aptly nicknamed Oxfordshire’s "dinosaur highway." You might recall the initial excitement in the summer of 2024, when the site at Dewars Farm quarry burst into the public consciousness, even featuring on BBC Two’s Digging For Britain. That initial dig was a sensation, revealing hundreds of footprints from both the fearsome, car-sized carnivore Megalosaurus and colossal herbivorous sauropods that dwarfed them. But as it turns out, that was merely the preview.
Driven by the success of the first excavation, a collaborative team from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the University of Birmingham returned to the site in the summer of 2025. Their mission was simple: to see just how far the dinosaur trail would go. What they found after a week of intense digging was nothing short of monumental. They exposed a single, continuous pathway stretching an astonishing 220 meters from the first print to the last. To put that in perspective, that’s longer than two full-length soccer pitches laid end-to-end. This wasn't a chaotic scuffle of prints; this was the preserved path of a single, immense sauropod—a long-necked behemoth like the Cetiosaurus—on a walk across its ancient home.
The sheer scale of this individual trackway is enough to take your breath away, but the real magic of the site lies in its bustling social scene. Dr. Duncan Murdock, an Earth Scientist at OUMNH, perfectly captures the thrill. "What is most exciting about this site," he says, "is the sheer size and number of footprints. We now have evidence of tens of individuals moving through this area at around the same time, perhaps as a herd." Can you imagine it? Not just one solitary giant, but a whole group of them, moving together through the landscape. It transforms the site from a simple path into a prehistoric thoroughfare, a snapshot of complex social behavior frozen in stone.
Unearthing this Jurassic treasure, however, was a battle against the elements. A team of more than 100 volunteers and researchers from several universities faced a much different challenge than the year before. The summer of 2025 had baked the quarry's surface to a concrete-like hardness, making the delicate work of excavation painstakingly difficult. They focused on a line of about 80 enormous sauropod prints, each up to a meter long, running north-south across the site. While the hardened ground prevented them from exposing every single footprint, their efforts revealed three additional sauropod trackways. Intriguingly, one of these appears to be a continuation of prints first spotted back in 2022. Although not yet continuously exposed, this trail might eventually prove to be even longer than the record-breaking one once all the digital and physical data is stitched together.
Beyond the monumental footprints, the site offered smaller, more intimate glimpses into a lost world. The discovery of a crocodile jaw, fragments of marine invertebrates, and delicate plant material helps flesh out the ecosystem. This wasn't a barren wasteland; it was a vibrant, watery environment teeming with life, where giants waded through lagoons and rivers. A new systematic approach to sampling the sediments that fill the footprints is underway, and this geochemical analysis could reveal further secrets about the climate and environment the dinosaurs inhabited.
The story of the Jurassic Highway is far from over. More of the footprint surface is expected to be exposed in the coming years, and a full scientific paper detailing the site's significance is imminent. Each new scrape of the trowel, each carefully brushed-away layer of sediment, brings us one step closer to understanding the daily lives of these magnificent creatures. The rolling hills of Oxfordshire have always held a certain charm, but now, they hold an epic, 166-million-year-old story written in stone, waiting for us to read it.
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