Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Tracking Dinosaurs In Oxfordshire

Oxford researchers return to the Jurassic Highway | University of Oxford

Members of the 2025 excavation team

One of the sauropod trackways.

Photos: Emma Nicholls.

Oxfordshire, where I was born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life, is steeped in fossil history. Notably, the lower jaw of the very first named dinosaur — Megalosaurus bucklandii — was discovered in Stonesfield, in the quaintly named valley, Bag's Bottom, the centre of the former Stonesfield slate industry, just about a mile and a half from my childhood home in the hamlet of Fawler.

About 166 million years ago, in the Middle Jurassic, much of the region now known as Oxfordshire lay under a warm, shallow sea. A sandbar separated it from the open ocean, forming a tranquil lagoon. Sediment slowly accumulated, forming limestone that preserved innumerable small molluscs. Even today, you can spot their fossilised shells in the drystone walls built from that same limestone — a subtle but constant reminder of deep time.

When I was a teenager, I would take the grandsons of the renowned palaeoanthropologist and former President of the Royal Society, Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, on fossil-hunting excursions. One disused quarry, rich in fossil mussels, coiled snails and bivalves, became a familiar haunt. But nothing we ever uncovered then compares to what has just been unearthed at Dewars Farm Quarry, between Middleton Stoney and Ardley. Dubbed the “Oxfordshire Dinosaur Highway,” this newly announced discovery appears to be the longest dinosaur trackway known in Europe, at 220 metres.

The work was conducted by a team of palaeontologists co-led by Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) and The University of Birmingham. Unsurprisingly, this find challenges certain creationist narratives and casually refuted the Bible creation myth. The announcement was recently made in an Oxford University news release.

The Dewars Farm site preserves a remarkable series of Middle Jurassic footprints left by several species of dinosaurs, some of which walked this area around 166 million years ago. The trackway stretches for over 140 metres, making it the longest continuous dinosaur track ever recorded in Europe. What makes this discovery so striking is not just its length, but its clarity and density: thousands of well-preserved prints give us a rare, almost cinematic glimpse of animal movement frozen in time.

Among the most common tracks are those of large sauropods — long-necked, herbivorous dinosaurs whose sheer bulk must have made the soft lagoonal mud quiver as they passed. There are also prints attributed to theropods, the bipedal, predatory relatives of modern birds. Together, these tracks record not just isolated visits, but repeated use of a route: a genuine dinosaur highway along the edge of a shallow Jurassic lagoon.

From the perspective of evolutionary biology, the find offers more than an evocative image of a vanished world. It provides evidence of behavioural patterns — group movement, migration routes, or habitual pathways — that can be tied to ecological conditions at the time. The presence of both sauropods and theropods in the same landscape highlights how diverse dinosaur communities were already well established by the Middle Jurassic, long before the better-known giants of the Late Jurassic and Cretaceous walked the Earth.

For archaeology, though this is deep prehistory rather than human history, the site is significant because it shows how ancient landscapes shaped the movement of living creatures long before humans appeared. In this sense, it offers an analogue for how environmental features constrain and guide movement — something archaeologists often study in relation to prehistoric people.

In palaeobiology, trackways such as these provide insights that bones alone cannot. Fossils reveal anatomy, but footprints record behaviour: how these animals walked, how many there were, how fast they moved, and whether they travelled together or alone. Such data help researchers reconstruct entire ecosystems, showing that these dinosaurs lived in complex, dynamic environments.

The “Jurassic Highway” of Oxfordshire thus stands as a rare and vivid record of life in motion — not just a snapshot, but a sequence, almost like a reel of film impressed into stone. Its preservation gives scientists an extraordinary opportunity to understand dinosaurs as living animals interacting with their environment, rather than as skeletons mounted in a museum.

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For scientists, discoveries like this are a powerful testament to the deep history of life on Earth. For creationists, however, they present a serious problem. A 140-metre dinosaur trackway, preserved in marine lagoonal limestone, is impossible to reconcile with claims that the Earth is only a few thousand years old or that all species were created simultaneously. These prints were made by living animals walking on soft sediment, which was then gently buried, compacted, and lithified over millions of years. They cannot be the result of a single catastrophic event such as a supposed global flood.

If such a flood had occurred, the rapidly rising and highly turbulent water would have washed away or obliterated any footprints before they could even begin to be preserved. The formation of this trackway required a stable, shallow, calm environment in which the sediment could dry just enough to hold impressions, followed by steady burial under fine material. This process is entirely incompatible with the violent hydrodynamics of a global deluge.

Moreover, the trackway is part of a well-understood geological sequence, bracketed by other Jurassic layers. The surrounding strata contain marine fossils such as molluscs that are used in biostratigraphy, and the layers can be dated independently through radiometric dating, placing them securely at around 166 million years old. This is not an isolated anomaly but one piece of a coherent, global geological record.

From an evolutionary perspective, the trackway reflects the diversification of dinosaur lineages during the Middle Jurassic. Sauropods and theropods were already well adapted to their respective ecological niches, and the evolutionary pathways that produced these animals required vast timescales — orders of magnitude longer than the few thousand years claimed by young-Earth creationism.

In short, the “Jurassic Highway” is not just a spectacular fossil site — it is direct, physical evidence of real animals moving across a real landscape in deep time. The conditions required to create and preserve these tracks simply could not have existed during a global flood. This is one more clear, measurable, and unambiguous line of evidence for an ancient Earth shaped by slow geological and evolutionary processes, not sudden cataclysmic myth.

You can find out more about the excavation in this new in-depth BBC feature: ‘In the footsteps of giants.’

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