This High School Rock Is Teeming With Dinosaur Footprints—but No One Noticed for Decades

During the early Jurassic period around 200 million years ago, Earth’s animals finally rebounded from one of the worst extinction events in the planet’s history. While paleontologists in Australia have not discovered any fossilized dinosaur bones from this period, these dinosaurs nevertheless made their bygone presence known.

Researchers have discovered the greatest concentration of dinosaur footprints per square meter (10.7-square-feet) in Australia known to science. Unbeknownst to paleontologists, the slab of rock had been sitting in a high school for decades. Their study, published March 20 in the journal Historical Biology, details this and other early Jurassic dinosaur footprints hiding right under their noses.

The 200-million-year-old footprints preserved in the high school rock “are from 47 individual dinosaurs which passed across a patch of wet, white clay, possibly walking along or crossing a waterway,” said Anthony Romilio, lead author of the study and a paleontologist at the University of Queensland, in a university statement. “It’s an unprecedented snapshot of dinosaur abundance, movement and behaviour from a time when no fossilised dinosaur bones have been found in Australia,” he added.

Using a cast, 3D imaging, and light filters, Romilio documented 66 footprints on the boulder’s surface. Each print had three toes, identifying them as the ichnospecies Anomoepus scambus: small herbivores with long legs, short arms, a beak, and a “chunky body,” according to the paleontologist (by ichnospecies, paleontologists are referring to species based on trace fossils, such as fossilized footprints, trails, nests, and poop, as opposed to bones and teeth). When these chunky dinos meandered across the wet clay, they were traveling less than 4 miles per hour (6 kilometers per hour).

The boulder was first discovered at a coal mine near Biloela, Central Queensland, two decades ago. It was then given to a high school, where it remained largely unnoticed until the community came across Romilio’s earlier work with dinosaur footprints and realized they might have something important.

“Significant fossils like this can sit unnoticed for years, even in plain sight,” Romilio explained. “It’s incredible to think that a piece of history this rich was resting in a schoolyard all this time.”

In fact, Romilio and his colleagues’ study highlights another set of footprints from the same region “also hiding in plain sight – I spotted it being used as a carpark entry delineator at Callide Mine,” he added. The specimen preserves two distinct footprints belonging to a larger two-legged dinosaur.

“Along with a sample from a third rock that is encased in resin and was being used as a bookend, we have gained new insight into the ancient past in this region,” Romilio concluded. In other words, maybe you should take a closer look at that stone door stop your grandparents have had forever…