UK's biggest dinosaur footprint site unearthed

87 points by peutetre 6 months ago | 14 comments
  • consumer451 6 months ago
    For reference, here is a map of the Earth's landmasses during that period. [0]

    The climate near Oxfordshire during the Middle Jurassic period would have been "humid, subtropical."

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic#/media/File:Mollweide...

    • louthy 6 months ago
      > The climate near Oxfordshire during the Middle Jurassic period would have been "humid, subtropical."

      And underwater if that map is anything to go by.

      • consumer451 6 months ago
        After I posted that, I found this map [0] to try to figure that out. Still not sure, exactly. Would it have been on the Anglo-Brabant Landmass, or the Pennine?

        I mean, clearly it was above sea level, right?

        [0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Generalised-Mid-Jurassic...

        • louthy 6 months ago
          Pennine is further north (modern Derbyshire/Peak District [1]), so unlikely there. The Anglo-Brabant Landmass is the most likely location as it juts into the eastern Cotswold region (Oxfordshire).

          [1] Source: me. Born and raised in the foothills of the Pennines in Derbyshire :)

          • potato3732842 6 months ago
            >I mean, clearly it was above sea level, right?

            Probably not by much. Think like Louisiana but with dinosaurs.

        • casenmgreen 6 months ago
          Ah, like my bathroom :-)
        • Etheryte 6 months ago
          Finally, an article about an interesting discovery that doesn't skimp on images. Props to the BBC.
          • goldfeld 6 months ago
            And here I was genuinely under the impression it was about some startup's stack, way these news go, maybe british unicorns are perforce dinosaurs..
          • 6 months ago
            • chris_5f 6 months ago
              I am curious if there is a full team that does the research?

              Do they use any AI Tools? The biggest question is do we have ant tools which helps in this? I think BBC or Discovery along with some archeological team should make a tool like this and leverage the tech power. maybe there are some patterns that we couldn't decode and AI can. Would be a fun thing to follow on.

              • nobunaga 6 months ago
                The fact that ppl think AI is now the solution to everything just because we have a good auto complete tech developed goes to show how much our industry needs a reset. The other day I read someones comment about how we should spend 7T dollars to get to AGI. If our industry had a little more sense and standard, half of the ppl in tech wouldnt meet the bar for sensibility. We probably would also be a lot further ahead in areas we need to be and id definitely enjoy working more in tech. Less idiocy, more sensibility
                • toyg 6 months ago
                  you don't really need "AI". There are plenty of solid tools already available for archeology, typically what is lacking is the images to run them on. That's why they are still discovering entire "lost cities" - because someone takes good quality pictures for one reason or another, archeologists then feed them into their tools, and voilà...
                • casenmgreen 6 months ago
                  So, wait, is this;

                  a. UK's "biggest dinosaur footprint" site unearthed

                  i.e. a site with the biggest dinosaur footprint found in the UK

                  or

                  b. UK's biggest "dinosaur footprint site" unearthed

                  i.e.a site with the most dinosaur footprints ever found in the UK

                  (I can't easily check, BBC news site is in my personal blocklist, because their news home page is basically a mortuary. Try it - go to their news page, whenever, and sum the number of reported deaths. Normally 100 to 150.)

                  • Symbiote 6 months ago
                    You could easily search for the same report in a different news source.
                    • argsnd 6 months ago
                      I mean yes news websites report on major incidents involving deaths.