Dinosaurs are cool. Little kids love them – I did, and do today, just as much. My grandson Bubba does, too, and we have spent many hours bonding over dinosaur videos. So when a new discovery comes out, it’s fun to read all about it.

A recent discovery in the United Kingdom, though, is different in a way that many folks might not think of at first. That’s because these are not dino-bones or other fossilized remains – these are footprints.

A worker digging up clay in a southern England limestone quarry noticed unusual bumps that led to the discovery of a “dinosaur highway” and nearly 200 tracks that date back 166 million years, researchers said Thursday.

The extraordinary find made after a team of more than 100 people excavated the Dewars Farm Quarry, in Oxfordshire, in June expands upon previous paleontology work in the area and offers greater insights into the Middle Jurassic period, researchers at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham said.

The Jurassic was mid-stream in the Mesozoic and something of a dino heyday. This was the time when gigantic sauropods, some weighing 80-90 tons and measuring almost a hundred feet long, wandered the land in herds. It would have been an amazing time to see – and that’s when these tracks were made. The AP story linked above continued:

“These footprints offer an extraordinary window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing details about their movements, interactions, and the tropical environment they inhabited,” said Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontology professor at the University of Birmingham.

Four of the sets of tracks that make up the so-called highway show paths taken by gigantic, long-necked, herbivores called sauropods, thought to be Cetiosaurus, a dinosaur that grew to nearly 60 feet (18 meters) in length. A fifth set belonged to the Megalosaurus, a ferocious 9-meter predator that left a distinctive triple-claw print and was the first dinosaur to be scientifically named two centuries ago.

An area where the tracks cross raises questions about possible interactions between the carnivores and herbivores.

Interactions – that’s the key.