Glimpse of life 165m years ago revealed at site of biggest dinosaur track way in UK

'A footprint is a snapshot of the life of the animal. You can learn things about how it moved' Richard Butler University of Birmingham

- Esther Addley Geneva Abdul

Gary Johnson was clearing clay with a digger at the Oxfordshire quarry where he works when he hit an unexpected bump in the limestone surface.

"I thought, it's just an abnormality in the ground," he said.

"But then it got to another, three metres along, and it was hump again, and then it went another three metres, hump again."

What Johnson had discovered was part of an enormous dinosaur trackway dating to nearly 166m years ago, when the quarry was a warm, shallow lagoon crisscrossed by the huge creatures.

"I thought I'm the first person to see them," Johnson, a worker at Dewars Farm Quarry, told the BBC. "And it was so surreal - a bit of a tingling moment, really."

Researchers have now unearthed about 200 large footprints at the site, making this the biggest dinosaur trackway ever found in Britain. The tracks are thought to have been made by two types of dinosaur: the herbivorous cetiosaurus, a sauropod that walked on four legs, and the smaller carnivorous megalosaurus.

So far, five separate trackways have been found stretching up to 150 metres in length, and experts from the universities of Oxford and Birmingham believe they could extend much further as only part of the quarry has been excavated.