66 Dinosaur Footprints Were Discovered at a School
A single boulder at a regional school in central Queensland was hiding 66 fossilized footprints in plain sight.
Researchers that 47 individual dinosaurs made marks on the boulder, which originally came from a nearby mine and was given to a local high school.
The boulder sat in the open for 20 years until curious community members contacted experts at the University of Queensland.
A boulder siting in a Queensland, Australia, high school foyer turned out to have one of the richest treasure troves of natural history in the entire country. As a University of Queensland (UQ) researcher recently confirmed, that boulder housed one of the highest concentrations of dinosaur footprints ever documented in Australia. The rock—originally pulled from the Callide Mine near Biloela and donated to the school—has sat in the school's foyer for over 20 years.
'The footprints are from 47 individual dinosaurs which passed across a patch of wet, white clay, possibly walking along or crossing a waterway,' Anthony Romilio, paleontologist in UQ's Dinosaur Lab, said in a statement from the university. 'It's an unprecedented snapshot of dinosaur abundance, movement, and behavior from a time when no fossilized dinosaur bones have been found in Australia.'
Each of the 66 total prints features three toes, indicating they belong to the ichnospecies Anomoepus scambus—a small dinosaur with legs ranging in length from six to 20 inches. Based on the tracks, Romilio estimates the animals were moving at less than four miles per hour when crossing the area of the boulder.
'Evidence from skeletal fossils overseas tells us dinosaurs with feet like these were plant eaters with long legs, a chunky body, short arms, and small head with a beak,' Romilio said.
The community was unknowingly walking the collection of Early Jurassic period fossils every day, until Romilio's work defining dinosaur tracks was made public via a nearby Mount Morgan project. Someone in the community saw similarities in the tracks at the school and contacted him to flag the boulder for further examination.
Romilio used advanced 3D imaging and light filters to reveal hidden details in the footprints. The search also led him to discover other fossilized tracks in the area—one on a rock used as a bookend and a set on a 2.2-ton boulder (sitting in the open at the Callide Mine parking lot) that featuring two distinct footprints left by a slightly larger dinosaur.
'As I'm driving into the car park,' Romilio told Agence France-Presse, 'I see one of those car park boulders to stop cars from driving on the lawn. And it's got this clear-as-day dinosaur fossil. My jaw dropped when I saw that.'
Romilio published a study in Historical Biology chronicling how, until now, only a single track had been found from the sandstones of the Callide Basin. 'With no dinosaurian osteological record from Australia's Early Jurassic, these footprints provide valuable evidence for the presence, abundance, and behavior of ornithischian dinosaurs in the region,' he wrote in the study.
'Significant fossils like this can sit unnoticed for years, even in plain sight,' Romilio said. 'It's incredible to think that a piece of history this rich was resting in a schoolyard all this time.'
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