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Dinosaur Footprints On The Move After 168 Million Years

May 21 2004


A precious set of dinosaur footprints has been on the move this week, for the first time in about 168 million years. They have been cut out of the ground ready to go on display in a museum at Woodstock in Oxfordshire.

Shows a photo of a huge three-toed footprint in some mud. Next to it is a man's feet, wearing black shoes - they look tiny in contrast!

Photo: check out the size difference! This is one of the Ardley prints.

The footprints were found in Ardley Quarry - Oxfordshire's answer to 'Jurassic Park'. There are more than thirty tracks or sets of prints, criss-crossing over each other.

They belong to two different types of dinosaur: the giant carnivorous (meat-eating) Megalosaurus and the even more gigantic herbivorous (vegetarian) Cetiosaurus.


168 million years ago, in the Jurassic period, the land would have been a wet mudflat. As the dinosaurs walked their feet sank into the soft, soggy ground, leaving clear prints. Gradually, over time, the land dried out and the footprints were fossilised.

Photo: here's one of the experts who studied the prints, with a picture of how a Megalosaurus might have looked.

Shows a man wearing glasses, a white hard hat and a fluorescent yellow jacket. He's holding a artist's impression of a Megalosaurus.


One of the Megalosaurus tracks shows the dinosaur walking along at first and then beginning to run. We can tell this because the distance between the prints gets longer and longer as they go along.


The Megalosaurus, a relative of the fearsome T-rex, walked on two hind legs and would have been able to run at up to 30 kilometres per hour. It would have been between 7 and 8 metres long.

Shows a photo of two people in a muddy quarry looking at a set of three-toed footprints in the mud.

Photo: this shows one track of prints in the quarry.


The Cetiosaurus was a much slower and bigger creature. It looked very much like a Brontosaurus, with a long neck, tiny head and big body. It would have been about 15 metres long.


While we wait for the prints to go on display at Woodstock, why not visit the Oxford University Museum of Natural History? They have taken plaster casts of some of the prints and created a walkway on their front lawn.

Photo: and here's one they prepared earlier! This shows a cast of a print being taken.

Shows a man in overalls leaning over a footprint in the mud, making a plaster cast of it.


So, you can walk in the dinosaurs' footprints! Inside the museum they have fossilised Megalosaurus and Cetiosaurus bones so you can get a really good idea of how the huge dinosaurs would have looked.


If you'd like to find out more about fossils on the web then What is a fossil? is a very good place to start. It explains how fossils are formed, with some great diagrams.

Shows a photo of a grass lawn, with a line of dinosaur footprints leading towards the Museum in the background. A group of children are walking along the line of footprints.

Photo: the lawn complete with dino footprints.

Anra Kennedy


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