‘Discovering dinosaur footprints was magical’

“When you uncover a fossil, you uncover a trackway, you’re the first person, ever, who’s seen that and discovered that.”

Oswestry born Prof Richard Butler was a part of the group which uncovered one of the longest dinosaur trackways found anywhere in the world.

The prints have been discovered on Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire, with the path extending for 220m (656ft).

“It’s an incredible site, we’ve been working for the last two years together with the University of Oxford excavating the site,” mentioned Prof Butler, a vertebrate palaeontologist on the University of Birmingham.

“You can find out things that are completely new about past ecosystems and about past life that we just didn’t know before, and it is magical,” he mentioned.

“At the base of the quarry, you’ve got these Jurassic-Age rocks, about 167 million years old, and they effectively preserve an ancient beach – along which many, many different dinosaurs walked, and that snapshot in time has been preserved through until the present day.”

Prof Butler obtained a PhD in Geology from the University of Bristol in 2002, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2007.

In the years following, he did analysis for a number of establishments, together with the Natural History Museum London and Emmy Noether Programme in Munich.

Now, he teaches for a number of the time, in addition to doing analysis.

“We have students who come to the university to study palaeontology and geology,” he mentioned.

“I teach them a range of different things… I run a field course out to the west and United States to Utah and Colorado, where students learn to collect and excavate fossils in the field.”

In his analysis, he specialises on understanding dinosaur evolution, so has frolicked travelling the world to gather fossils – together with in Kurdistan, Morocco, and Scotland.