Natural History Museum

On the grassed area outside the Natural History Museum is a dinosaur footprint trackway made from casts taken from Ardley Quarry in North Oxfordshire. Ardley Quarry has revealed a total of 42 more-or-less continuous trackways in the Jurassic limestone on the quarry floor. This is the largest dinosaur trackway site to have been discovered in the UK, and also appears to contain some of the longest dinosaur trackways in the world.

A Megalosaurus footprint trackway at Ardley Quarry

The casts outside the Museum are thought to have been made by Megalosaurus, who at 7m long and weighing about a ton, was one of the largest predators in the Jurassic. Footprints from another dinosaur, Cetiosaurus, are also present at Ardley Quarry. Cetiosaurus was a sauropod, would have been about 15m long and would have weighed up to 27 tons. The Megalosaurus footprints are particularly important because they show that the dinosaur used different hind-limb postures when walking and running.

Artwork by David M. Waterhouse

Megalosaurus

Lots of behavioural information can also be interpreted from the footprints, and it has been suggested that Cetiosaurus moved in herds, and that Megalosaurus could have hunted in packs.