one of the longest dinosaur trackways found anywhere in the world<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe prints were found on Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire, with the trail extending for 220m (656ft).<\/p>\n
“It’s an incredible site, we’ve been working for the last two years together with the University of Oxford excavating the site,” said Prof Butler, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Birmingham.<\/p>\n
“You can find out things that are completely new about past ecosystems and about past life that we just didn’t know before, and it is magical,” he said.<\/p>\n
“At the base of the quarry, you’ve got these Jurassic-Age rocks, about 167 million years old, and they effectively preserve an ancient beach – along which many, many different dinosaurs walked, and that snapshot in time has been preserved through until the present day.”<\/p>\n
Prof Butler got a PhD in Geology from the University of Bristol in 2002, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2007.<\/p>\n
In the years following, he did research for several institutions, including the Natural History Museum London and Emmy Noether Programme in Munich.<\/p>\n
Now, he teaches for some of the time, as well as doing research.<\/p>\n
“We have students who come to the university to study palaeontology and geology,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I teach them a range of different things… I run a field course out to the west and United States to Utah and Colorado, where students learn to collect and excavate fossils in the field.”<\/p>\n
In his research, he specialises on understanding dinosaur evolution, so has spent time travelling the world to collect fossils – including in Kurdistan, Morocco, and Scotland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Adam GreenBBC Radio Shropshire University of Birmingham Prof Richard Butler (second left) and colleagues worked at the site…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138312,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[18,19,17,133],"class_list":{"0":"post-138311","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-science"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138311","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=138311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1761138308_954_grey-placeholder.png\")
![\"University](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/e5eca710-af33-11f0-b1c6-736a05ed5483.jpg.webp.webp\")
University of Birmingham<\/p>\n