The largest dinosaur crossing site in the UK has been discovered in a quarry in Oxfordshire, the BBC reports.

About 200 huge footprints, made 166 million years ago, cross the limestone floor.

They reveal the transit two different types of dinosaurs believed to be a long-necked sauropod called Cetiosaurus and the smaller carnivore Megalosaurus.

The longest runs are 150 meters long, but could be extended much longer as only part of the quarry has been excavated.

“This is one of the most impressive dinosaur crossing sites I have ever seen, in terms of scale, i.e. the number of footprintssaid Professor Kirsty Edgar, a micropalaeontologist from the University of Birmingham.

“You can step back in time and get an idea of ​​what it would have been like, these huge creatures just roaming around».

The tracks were first spotted by Gary Johnson, a worker at Dewars Farm Quarry, while driving an excavator.

“I basically cleaned the floor and hit a pothole and thought it was just a bump in the ground,” he said, pointing to a ridge where some mud has been pushed up as a dinosaur’s foot is pressed down into the earth.

“But then I got to another spot, after 3 meters across, and hit a pothole again. I continued for 3 meters and hit a pothole again.”

Another site with dinosaur footprints had been found nearby in the 1990s, so he realized that the normal bumps and dips could be dinosaur tracks.

“I thought I was the first person to see them. And it was so surreal – a head-tingling moment, really“, he told BBC News.

This summer, more than 100 scientists, students and volunteers took part in an excavation at the quarry which features in the new Digging for Britain series.

The team found five different pathways.

Four of them were made by Sauropods, herbivorous dinosaurs that walked on four legs. Their tracks look a bit like an elephant – only they are much, much bigger – these beasts reached 18 meters.

Another piece is believed to have been created by a Megalosaurus.

“It’s almost like a caricature of a dinosaur footprintexplained Dr Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Oxford’s Natural History Museum.

“It’s what we call a three-finger print. It has these three toes that are very, very clear in the print».

The carnivorous creatures, which walked on two legs, were agile hunters, he said.

“The entire animal would have been 6-9 meters long. They were the largest predatory dinosaurs known from the Jurassic period in Britain.”

The environment they lived in was covered by a warm, shallow lagoon, and the dinosaurs left their footprints as they ran across the mud.

“Something must have happened to preserve them in the fossil record“, said Professor Richard Butler, a paleobiologist from the University of Birmingham.

“We don’t know exactly what, but there may have been a storm, which deposited a load of sediment on top of the tracks and they were preserved instead of just being washed away».

The team studied the pathways in detail during the excavation. They took more than 20,000 photos to create 3D models of the individual prints.

“The really great thing about a dinosaur footprint, especially if we have the entire track, is that it’s a snapshot in the animal’s lifeProfessor Butler explained.

“You can learn things about how that animal moved. You can find out exactly what the environment was like in which he lived. So footprints give us a whole different set of information that you can’t get from the fossil bone record.”