What’s your favorite dinosaur? – The Unconventional Gardener

Header picture: Artist’s reconstruction of Megalosaurus and Cetiosaurus leaving tracks on the Dewars Farm Quarry web site. Picture credit score: © Mark Witton 2024

What’s your favorite dinosaur? Once I was requested that query final 12 months (an uncommon state of affairs for an grownup to search out themselves in, I grant you), I stated the duck-billed hadrosaur, Maiasaura peeblesorum, fossils from which have been into area. Within the Eighties, palaeontologists found Maiasaura nests in Montana alongside fossils of eggs, hatchlings and grownup dinosaurs, suggesting that the adults cared for his or her offspring. This earned Maiasaura the nickname ‘good mom lizard’, though the extent of their parental care remains to be debated.

This 12 months, although, I’ll change my thoughts. Simply earlier than Christmas, we have been driving north to satisfy up with family. Looking the window alongside the M40, I seen a vibrant, striped constructing, and puzzled what it was. I forgot about it till I noticed it within the background of a information {photograph} displaying the invention of an infinite trackway of dinosaur footprints in Dewars Farm Quarry close to Bicester.

The footprints, initially unearthed by an unsuspecting quarry employee, date again to the Center Jurassic Interval, about 166 million years in the past. A number of the tracks have been recognized as belonging to Megalosaurus, a ferocious 9m predator with distinctive, giant, three-toed toes with claws. Others belong to herbivorous sauropods (“veggiesaurs” – we’ve been watching Jurassic Park!) as much as twice as giant.

“These footprints provide a unprecedented window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing particulars about their actions, interactions, and the tropical atmosphere they inhabited.”

Professor Kirsty Edgar, College of Birmingham

Within the Center Jurassic Interval, what’s now a limestone quarry in temperate Oxfordshire would have been a tropical muddy lagoon close to the ocean. Different fossil proof from across the tracks will give scientists a greater image of the atmosphere on the time.

“The preservation is so detailed that we will see how the mud was deformed because the dinosaur’s toes squelched out and in. Together with different fossils like burrows, shells and vegetation we will deliver to life the muddy lagoon atmosphere the dinosaurs walked by means of.”

Dr Duncan Murdock, Earth Scientist at OUMNH

Though smaller trackways have been found in close by Ardley Quarry in 1997, fashionable expertise implies that the brand new finds will be way more completely explored and documented, offering a 3D digital document that may be shared and saved.

Megalosaurus was the primary ever dinosaur to be scientifically named and described (though the time period ‘dinosaur’ wasn’t coined till 18 years later). Palaeontologist William Buckland formally launched Megalosaurus throughout a gathering of the Geological Society of London in 1824, based mostly on a examine of fossils found in Oxfordshire.

So I could change my thoughts and throw my help behind an area hero – Megalosaurus. How about you?

References

“Main new footprint discoveries on Britain’s ‘dinosaur freeway’”, College of Birmingham, 2 January 2025. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/information/2024/major-new-footprint-discoveries-on-britains-dinosaur-highway

Emma Caton, “The seven biggest dinosaur discoveries of the final 200 years”, Nautral Historical past Museum, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/uncover/200-years-of-dinosaur-discoveries.html

Mike Pitts, “I can simply see these dinosaurs plodding by means of the Cotswold mud”, The Guardian, 5 January 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/05/i-can-just-see-those-dinosaurs-plodding-through-the-cotswold-mud

Except in any other case acknowledged, © Copyright Emma Doughty 2025. Printed on theunconventionalgardener.com.

Should you loved this submit, please contemplate supporting my work. I’ve a subscriber-only Patreon for area plant fans, or you would simply purchase me a cup of tea:





Many thanks!