{"id":129004,"date":"2025-10-17T22:53:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T22:53:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/129004\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T22:53:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T22:53:19","slug":"researchers-discovered-europes-longest-dinosaur-highway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/129004\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers Discovered Europe’s Longest ‘Dinosaur Highway’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The longest \u2018dinosaur highway<\/a>\u2019 in Europe has been discovered in the Oxfordshire quarry in the UK, dating back roughly 166 million years.<\/p>\n

\u2018Dinosaur Highway\u2019 Discovered
\n\"20252025 Dewars Farm Tracksite; Photo: Richard Butler, University of Birmingham<\/p>\n

The trail stretches approximately 722 feet (220 meters) from the first to the last exposed print, making it Europe\u2019s longest sauropod dinosaur<\/a> trackway. It consists of almost 100 footprints, each measuring up to 3.2 feet (1 meter) in length.<\/p>\n

The excavation was co-led by experts from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) and the University of Birmingham. They believe the prints were left by a Cetiosaurus, a four-legged sauropod species that was an herbivore with a long neck and tail, capable of reaching lengths of about 52.5-59 feet (16 to 18 meters).<\/p>\n

The species lived during the Middle Jurassic Period, approximately 171 to 165 million years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is most exciting about this site 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,\u201d said <\/a>Dr. Duncan Murdock, Earth Scientist at OUMNH, on October 14.<\/p>\n

The fossilized footprints were found at Dewars Farm Quarry during routine limestone removal this year, but the site\u2019s first trackways were discovered in the 1990s. The excavation is part of an on-and-off excavation that began in 2022.<\/p>\n

A team of over 100 people participated in the excavation, uncovering four trackways made by sauropods. Notably, one of these trackways appears to be a continuation of prints from 2022, meaning it could be even longer than the new record.<\/p>\n

The footprints provided researchers with information about how the dinosaurs moved, particularly their walking speed. The speed is calculated using measurements of the prints and the stride length.<\/p>\n

Researchers can approximate the dinosaur\u2019s pace by comparing these measurements to modern four-legged animals, like elephants. They estimated that the sauropod\u2019s speed was approximately 4 to 5 miles an hour<\/a>, which is similar to the average walking speed of a human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The longest \u2018dinosaur highway\u2019 in Europe has been discovered in the Oxfordshire quarry in the UK, dating back…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[55055,18,19,17,77697,133,77698],"class_list":{"0":"post-129004","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-discoveries","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-nature-gardening","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-world-of-inspiration"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}