The environment they lived in was covered by a warm, shallow lagoon and the dinosaurs left their prints as they ambled across the mud.

“Something must have happened to preserve these in the fossil record,” said Prof Richard Butler, a palaeobiologist from the University of Birmingham.

“We don’t know exactly what, but it might be that there was a storm event that came in, deposited a load of sediments on top of the footprints, and meant that they were preserved rather than just being washed away.”

The team studied the trackways in detail during the dig. As well as making casts of the tracks, they took more than 20,000 photographs to create 3D models of both the complete site and individual footprints.

“The really lovely thing about a dinosaur footprint, particularly if you have a trackway, is that it is a snapshot in the life of the animal,” Prof Butler explained.

“You can learn things about how that animal moved. You can learn exactly what the environment that it was living in was like. So tracks give us a whole different set of information that you can’t get from the bone fossil record.”