Massive Sauropod Trackway Uncovered in the UK

This trackway, one of the longest ever discovered, was found in the UK in an Oxfordshire quarry. The footprints are about three feet across (“insanely big,” says one researcher), and altogether the trackway stretches continuously over more than 700 feet. And it’s not the only trackway in the quarry—there are finds dating back to the 1990s, including 200 other “huge footprints” found in 2024 and smaller prints interpreted as being from “a two-legged carnivorous dinosaur called Megalosaurus.”

In order to access this new trackway, “a controlled explosion in the quarry remove[d] millions of years of limestone rock, allowing the palaeontologists the more delicate task of excavating each sunken footprint.” But, as the BBC article reporting on this find asks, “how on earth are [these footprints] still here after 166 million years?”

Yes, in the evolutionary worldview, these tracks have survived for an incomprehensibly long time—166 million years. And yet, if the researchers don’t somehow preserve them, the newly exposed prints will erode away in just a few years.

So what does it take to make these trackways? The article says,

“Footprints require the ‘Goldilocks effect’,” explains Prof Edgar.

“You need the sediment to be of the right consistency, the right type, and in the right environment to make the footprints.”

As the creature walked in the mud, its feet sinking down with each step under its enormous weight, the prints left behind baked in the Sun. Then these hardened hollows were covered over by sediment—perhaps a tide of mud that washed over them as a storm blew in.

“It is quite unique to get that sort of confluence of events where they’re both made and then quickly preserved, particularly in this kind of quantity.”

And that’s not all. The site also preserves delicate sea creatures.

We’ve got little seashells—things like bivalves and brachiopods. . . . Right here is a little belemnite, which is a squid-like animal that was swimming through the water. . . . And we found this little sea urchin. It’s got this one spine that’s broken off, otherwise it’s an almost complete little, tiny sea urchin.

So not only were fragile footprints preserved in the fossil record but they were preserved alongside sea creatures!

They’re a reminder of the one-of-a-kind conditions of the global, catastrophic flood of Noah’s day.

Now, in our world today, storms aren’t routinely forming fossils of any kind, let alone fossil footprints—or trackways over 700 feet long! And that’s because fossilization requires very specific conditions, such as rapid burial. Fossil footprints like these aren’t a testimony to “Goldilocks” conditions some 166 million years ago that just happened to preserve a series of footprints alongside sea creatures. They’re a reminder of the one-of-a-kind conditions of the global, catastrophic flood of Noah’s day.

You see, if there really was a global flood, we’d expect to find billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. And that’s exactly what we do observe. Extremely well-preserved fossils like these are a tremendous confirmation of the rapid burial that took place as the floodwaters rose to cover the entire earth, dumping sediment and forming the rock layers and fossils along the way.

What we see confirms the Bible’s history as recorded in Genesis, not evolutionary “just so” stories.

For more details on this find, I encourage you to read this excellent article from AiG–UK writer and speaker Gavin Cox.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.