Excavations carried out to prepare a new road through the Leicestershire countryside have revealed more than 100 million years of history.

The 7km-long northern and eastern sections of the Melton Mowbray Distributor Road will act as a bypass for the town once construction is complete.

But before the new road surface was laid, teams from Leicestershire County Council contractors Galliford Try uncovered the road’s past.

They have studied 11 sites since 2023 to understand the past – and the council said a “long history of human activity” had been unearthed which is “locally and regionally significant”.

The first finds recorded by the team include the fossilized remains of part of the skull of an ichthyosaur, an extinct marine reptile, dating to at least 100 million years ago, when Melton was submerged in a shallow ocean. deep.

Archaeologists say it dates from the Lower Cretaceous, Mesozoic Era, also known as the Age of Dinosaurs.

The marine predator was not a dinosaur, but a type of warm-blooded, air-breathing marine predator, much like dolphins.

They could measure up to 25 m in length and lived between 250 and 90 million years ago.

Their remains are normally found along coastlines and are sometimes exposed by cliff erosion.

A similar one the discovery was made in Rutland in 2021although the discovery of such remains in interior areas is considered unusual.

The council said it had also found evidence of humans living in the Melton area as far back as 8,000 years ago, during the Middle Stone Age, or Mesolitic era.

This was a time when most people were hunter-gatherers, nomads, and used stone tools for hunting, cooking, and crafting.

Flint objects including scrapers, borers and even an arrowhead were found scattered across the region by the hundreds, according to archaeologists.

Some of these items were found in an ancient river channel, where it is believed that humans hunted animals such as deer.

They also discovered pits believed to date back around 5,000 years.

The pits are thought to provide evidence of early short-term settlement in the area.

Human burials have also been discovered dating back to the Early Bronze Age, around 3,500 years ago.

But archaeologists said people only began to settle in north Leicestershire much later, during the first century BC and first century AD, when four settlements were established in the area.

Iron Age pottery, animal bones and burnt stones have been discovered.

Much evidence has been found that the settlements were primarily populated by farmers, due to the number of field boundaries, enclosures, and agricultural structures in the area.

Mixed farming would have taken place on pre-Melton farms, according to archaeologists, who said they had discovered a potential vineyard and “rare” evidence of root crops grown in trenches by people living in the early Roman era.

The farms are thought to show that the area is taking its first steps towards becoming a market town, as surplus crops would likely have been grown for sale, fueling the local economy.

After the Romans left, the population also declined with short-term occupation in the early Saxon period, the council said.

The settlements were lost beneath the agricultural fields surrounding Melton Mowbray in the late medieval period.

The land then remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of years until archaeologists arrived ready to build a bypass road.

Planning for the road began in 2017 and main works began in May 2023.

The council said at its September budget meeting that the project was turning out to be more expensive than expected.

The need to carry out archaeological work was cited as one of the reasons for the overspending, along with poor weather conditions leading to flooding and ground instability.

The council had kept a further £11.6 million in reserve for the £127.7 million project, but has now said this money would likely have to be used for the project and costs could exceed that by £6 millions of pounds more.

Officers said authorities were working with the contractor to try to reduce excessive spending.

The goal is to open to traffic at the end of 2026.