Scientists hail highway of dinos in Australia
Site has tracks from as many as 21 species
Scientists have just confirmed the discovery of the world’s richest collection of dinosaur tracks — and it’s in a remote corner of western Australia.
Dubbed by discoverers as both “Australia’s Jurassic Park” and the “Cretaceous Serengeti,” the site has tracks from as many as 21 dinosaur species — including the largest single dinosaur footprint ever found.
“Nowhere else has as many different types of dinosaurs represented by tracks than Walmadany does,” said lead researcher Steve Salisbury in a video released by the University of Queensland.
In a paper published last week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, researchers said that the sheer quantity of dinosaur prints found was “unparalleled in Australia, and even globally.”
Not only do the tracks reveal a prehistoric Australia teeming with dinosaurs, but they constitute one of the only known records of dinosaurs having lived in the vast regions of western Australia.
The University of Queensland team behind the study visited the area on the invitation of the Indigenous Goolarabooloo people, who have known of the tracks for thousands of years.
The prevalence of dragon myths in so many world cultures has often been attributed to early human discoveries of dinosaur bones. Similarly, Goolarabooloo people credited their coastal landscape of three-toed tracks to a race of supernatural bird giants who helped to create and order the world.
Paleontologists have been studying the tracks since as early as 1967, but until now no comprehensive survey of the site has been conducted. As researchers noted, they were motivated in part due to fears that the tracks could be damaged by a planned natural gas facility.
“In recent years this section of coastline has come under considerable threat from extensive industrialization,” wrote Salisbury.
For about 400 hours, researchers “tracked” dinosaurs along a 25 kilometre section of coastline using drones, survey teams and silicone impressions of particularly important prints.
The prints all seem to have survived thanks to periodic flooding. Dry sandy landscapes would suddenly be turned into muck by sheet flooding — and after hundreds of dinosaurs had slogged their way through — the ground was then baked into what would become sandstone.
Their research soon revealed the area as a crowded highway for a who’s who of Cretaceous dinosaurs dating back 130 million years. Of the thousands documented, 150 tracks were linked to one of 21 species, including swift duckbilled dinosaurs, cow-like grazers, the Tyrannosaurus-esque Megalosaurus and the first stegosaurs documented in Australia.
At a staggering 1.7 metres, the largest examples came from sauropods, longnecked herbivores famous for being the biggest land animals to have existed.
“In many instances the sheer density of sauropod tracks … has resulted in the ground becoming so heavily trampled that trackways … and even individual tracks are difficult to identify with certainty,” reads the study.
While the track sites were placed on a heritage protection list in 2011, paleontologists are still keeping mum as to the exact locations of their richest discoveries.