LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Some of the roads that we drive every day follow the routes of much older trails.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Oh, I've heard about this, Leila. People say Broadway in New York City follows an old trail, for example.
FADEL: Yeah. Yeah, here's another thing - some of the old trails people follow, they grew out of the movements of animals.
INSKEEP: Oh, well, that makes sense - people hunting or whatever.
FADEL: And, Steve, this next story is about a highway that's even older, walked by dinosaurs millions of years ago in what is now the U.K.
INSKEEP: Wow.
FADEL: Yeah. A worker found more than 200 well-preserved dino tracks at Dewars Farm Quarry in southeastern England.
KIRSTY EDGAR: His bucket kept catching on something like a bump. Then every 3 meters, it caught on another bump.
INSKEEP: Bump, bump - these turned out to be dino tracks.
FADEL: Yeah. So that was Kirsty Edgar, a professor at the University of Birmingham. The team at the quarry called her and curators from Oxford University Museum of Natural History to investigate further.
INSKEEP: What did they find?
FADEL: Well, one of the largest dinosaur track sites in the world. Here's Professor Edgar again.
EDGAR: Four long trackways were made by sauropods. So these were herbivorous, four-legged dinosaurs, long necks. And then we had one trackway from a theropod, so a carnivorous predatory dinosaur, Megalosaurus.
INSKEEP: Different trackways - so there's, like, the express lane. There's a slow lane, the vegan lane. Anyway, whatever, go on.
FADEL: Turns out, the tracks are so well preserved, scientists could figure out how fast the dinosaurs were walking and what kind of landscape they traveled on.
EDGAR: All of the dinosaurs, based on our estimates of speed, were probably walking rather than running. So they were out just sort of having a nice day, and we know that the environment was probably lagoonal, probably looked something like the Florida Keys today. So imagine sort of these animals walking through that kind of environment.
INSKEEP: OK, so how does a dinosaur highway stay so well preserved for millions of years when my highway gets potholes every winter?
FADEL: (Laughter) In a word, it's water.
EDGAR: It needs to be sort of just right, like Goldilocks. If it's too soupy, you'll lose the track, and if it's too firm, you won't get a track. So this is why we most commonly find dinosaur tracks worldwide in areas around water, so lake margins, coastal settings, river settings.
FADEL: And so that could explain why this particular area is such a hotbed of historic findings. In the late '90s, on the other side of the quarry, another site was uncovered with the first evidence of a dinosaur breaking into a run.
INSKEEP: Oh, it's a race track. So will we be able to see any of these tracks in a museum?
FADEL: Yeah, no. Edgar says they're just too big. Instead, they hope to open the prehistoric highway to the public in the next couple of years.
INSKEEP: I can't wait to drive it.
FADEL: I'll be the walking dinosaur. You'll be the running one.
INSKEEP: Got it. Got it.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS' "JURASSIC PARK: JURASSIC PARK - MAIN TITLE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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