Gary Johnson was driving a digger at Dewars Farm Quarry in Oxfordshire, UK when he hit a big hump in the road.
"I thought it's just an abnormality in the ground," he told the BBC News. "But then it got to another, 3m along, and it was a hump again. And then it went another 3m – hump again."
Turns out, the series of humps was biggest path of dinosaur footprints ever discovered in the country.
The tracks are among hundreds in the area that date back 166 million years to the Middle Jurassic Period. From the University of Birmingham:
The longest continuous trackway measured more than 150 metres in length. Four of the trackways were made by gigantic, long-necked, herbivorous dinosaurs called sauropods, most likely to be Cetiosaurus, an up to 18-metre-long cousin of the well-known Diplodocus. The fifth trackway was made by the carnivorous theropod dinosaur, Megalosaurus which had distinctive, large, three-toed feet with claws. One area of the site shows the carnivore and herbivore tracks crossing over, raising questions about whether and how the two were interacting.
"These footprints offer an extraordinary window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing details about their movements, interactions, and the tropical environment they inhabited," says paleontologist Kirsty Edgar.
Previously:
• Why dinosaur bones were the real nail in religion's coffin
• The shoebill stork acts like a dinosaur
• Ancient humans were dino fans
