What’s your favorite dinosaur? – The Unconventional Gardener

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

What’s your favorite dinosaur? After I was requested that query final 12 months (an uncommon state of affairs for an grownup to seek 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 continues to be debated.

This 12 months, although, I could change my thoughts. Simply earlier than Christmas, we had been driving north to satisfy up with kin. Searching the window alongside the M40, I observed a vibrant, striped constructing, and puzzled what it was. I forgot about it till I noticed it within the background of a information {photograph} exhibiting the invention of an unlimited 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 few of the tracks have been recognized as belonging to Megalosaurus, a ferocious 9m predator with distinctive, massive, three-toed toes with claws. Others belong to herbivorous sauropods (“veggiesaurs” – we’ve been watching Jurassic Park!) as much as twice as massive.

“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 crops we will carry to life the muddy lagoon atmosphere the dinosaurs walked by means of.”

Dr Duncan Murdock, Earth Scientist at OUMNH

Though smaller trackways had been found in close by Ardley Quarry in 1997, trendy know-how implies that the brand new finds will be rather 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, primarily based on a research of fossils found in Oxfordshire.

So I could change my thoughts and throw my assist 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 best 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.

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