Unearthing a 166‑Million‑Year‑Old Footprint Site

Britain’s Jurassic Highway

It’s not every day you get to walk in the footsteps of giants. Yet that’s exactly what happened at Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire, where quarry worker Gary Johnson noticed unusual bumps in the rock. In 2024 and 2025 a team of more than a hundred volunteers, scientists and community members descended on the quarry to expose what they later called Britain’s Jurassic Highway. Over the course of a week they uncovered more than 200 dinosaur footprints, revealing five separate trackways running across the once‑muddy ground. Four of the trackways were made by the long‑necked sauropod Cetiosaurus, Britain’s largest herbivore at the time. The fifth was carved by Megalosaurus, a seven‑metre predator that holds the title of Britain’s earliest scientifically described dinosaur.

What makes this site extraordinary isn’t just the number of footprints, but their scale. Some of the trails stretch for 150 metres, making them among the longest continuous dinosaur trackways in Europe. Drone surveys recorded more than 20 000 photographs and scientists are building high‑resolution 3D models to study how these animals moved. The trackways show the sauropods strolling in a straight line while the predator casually crossed their path. Such scenes are rarely preserved, and the discovery echoes another Oxfordshire site at Ardley Quarry, where long sauropod trackways were found in the late 1990s. Together, these highway‑length footprints allow palaeontologists to test ideas about dinosaur gait, herd behaviour and predator–prey interactions.

Beyond the science, Dewars Farm has captured public imagination. The site was opened briefly to the local community, giving visitors the chance to stand where dinosaurs once walked. Researchers stress that the tracks are a fragile part of Britain’s geological heritage and hope the quarry owners will protect them in situ. As 3D models go on display and new research is published, this Jurassic highway is set to become a landmark discovery for British palaeontology.

Credit: Jon Sullivan / PD Photo.org

Sources: Natural History Museum report on the Dewars Farm trackways.