There are a lot of things that you might expect to see at an Australian high school. Backpacks filled to the brim with books? Sure. Forgotten pencils and half-finished pages of homework? Definitely. But a stone slab stamped with dozens of fossilized dinosaur tracks? That might be a little lower on your list.
As surprising as it may seem, however, Biloela State High School in Queensland has long been home to one of Australia’s most footprint-filled stones from the Early Jurassic period. Described for the first time in a paper published in Historical Biology, the boulder features 66 fossilized dinosaur footprints from around 200 million years ago — more than any other boulder of the same size from Australia.
“The footprints are from 47 individual dinosaurs, which passed across a patch of wet, white clay,” said Anthony Romilio, the primary author of the paper and the paleontologist who identified the tracks, in a press release. “It’s an unprecedented snapshot of dinosaur abundance, movement, and behavior from a time when no fossilized dinosaur bones have been found in Australia.”
Read More: What Are Fossils and Where Are They Found the Most?
Schoolyard Stone
Discovered by miners in the Dunn Creek area of the Callide Basin in Queensland and donated to Biloela State High School in 2002, the significance of the stone was overlooked for about two decades. But after Romilio found fossilized dinosaur tracks on other stones from the area, he turned to the Biloela State slab, which he found smattered with fossilized footprints from dinosaurs.
“Significant fossils like this can sit unnoticed for years, even in plain sight,” the University of Queensland researcher said in a press release. “It’s incredible to think that a piece of history this rich was resting in a schoolyard all this time.”
Read More: Why Are Fossils Only Found in Sedimentary Rocks?
Filling In With Footprints
Closely studying the stone, Romilio obtained impressive insights into the dinosaurs behind the tracks. “With advanced 3D imaging and light filters, I was able to reveal hidden details in the footprints,” he said in a release.
Varying in size from “tiny” to “small” to slightly larger than “small,” the tracks themselves were left by two-legged ornithischian dinosaurs, likely as they walked along or across a waterway. “Each footprint has three toes, indicating they belong to the ichnospecies Anomoepus scambus,” Romilio added in a release.
Like all other ichnospecies, this taxon is identifiable not by fossilized bones but by fossilized tracks. But these footprints say a lot about the ornithischians of Australia’s Early Jurassic period. The size and the spacing of the tracks indicate that these dinosaurs were small, for instance, with long legs that were around 6 to 20 inches in length. They also indicate that these dinosaurs moved at a moderate pace, walking at around 4 miles per hour.
“Evidence from skeletal fossils overseas tells us dinosaurs with feet like these were plant eaters,” Romilio said in a release. Equipped with bulky bodies, these dinosaurs also boasted long legs, short arms, and small heads with beaks.
Without fossilized bones from the time period, very little has been determined about the dinosaurs of Australia’s Early Jurassic. But where bones are absent, footprints fill in, divulging important information about the presence, abundance, and activity of dinosaurs that would’ve otherwise been forgotten to time.
Models of the stone are available online, alongside models of two other fossil-filled stones from the area, also attributed to A. scambus and also described in the Historical Biology paper. Accessible to all, these digitized footprints are now able to be seen not just by the students and teachers of Biloela State High School but by the world.
Read More: Thousands of Fossils Sit Forgotten in Museum Drawers. How One Paleontologist is Changing That
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Historical Biology. Dinosaur Footprints From the Lower Jurassic (Hettangian–Sinemurian) Precipice Sandstone of the Callide Basin, Queensland, Australia
Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
