Monster Feet

Tracking the big beasts of Yorkshire

After the last snowfall, did you step out early to see who’d travelled through the morning before you? Maybe there was a fox track on a city street, or deer footprints threading through a woodland, and you may have wondered about those animals running or stalking through the snow an hour or two earlier.

What did they see, and smell, and hear? What was it like for them, before you arrived?

A few years ago, I took a summer trip to the seaside for a similar experience, but with traces left in the sand, by animals that passed by millions of years ago.

Deer tracks in Scotland - Photo: Andrew Tryon  - Wikimedia Commons

Reports a few weeks ago revealed the discovery of a series of dinosaur tracks in an Oxfordshire quarry, now featured in an episode of the BBC’s Digging for Britain series, with an aerial photo of the fossilised footsteps not unlike the picture above.

I once met two Sheffield scientists from a team who’d uncovered and researched thousands of footprints on the Yorkshire coast, made by huge middle Jurassic dinosaurs, like the beasts of Oxfordshire.

I travelled with Dr Mike Romano and Dr Martin Whyte to Burniston and Scalby, to learn and hopefully see what they’d discovered. These Yorkshire footprints are more subtle and scattered, and bad weather and high tides make them harder to find.

But once you’ve seen and felt one of those strange marks, left without a moment’s thought by an animal as big as a seaside bungalow, and you’ll never again imagine dinosaurs as far-fetched monsters from another world.

Dewars Farm artist reconstruction Megalosaurus and Cetiosaurus close up © Mark Witton 2024

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