A dig near Bicester has uncovered spectacular tracks in what was once a Jurassic lagoon

There are many reasons to be excited about the dinosaur footprints whose discovery was announced last week. They will bring new understandings to the Jurassic world of more than 150m years ago. Their recording united quarry workers and more than a hundred scientists, students and other volunteers in a frenzied week of fieldwork. But there was something else in the images of long, winding trails across a stony plain in the Oxfordshire countryside. It looked to me as if great beasts had lumbered by, not in the distant past but just a few days before. I will never be able to rid my mind of the thought that they are alive now, out there somewhere. Who knew the Cotswolds were home to dinosaurs?

Smiths Bletchington’s limestone quarries have been turning up footprints for decades. The best came in 1997, at what is now a site of special scientific interest, in Ardley quarry: more than 40 sets, with trackways up to 180 metres long. The Ardley finds, made before digital recording, are hard to study today. But when the Oxford University Museum of Natural History heard of a nearby discovery late in 2023, it had high hopes. New technologies – including photogrammetry and drone photography – meant that anything of significance could be captured in detail, shared with scientists around the world and saved for posterity, whatever the fate of the actual prints. Palaeontologists from the museum and the universities of Birmingham and Oxford soon confirmed that Dewars Farm Quarry, a couple of miles from Ardley, was an important site. They mounted a dig last summer.