The administrators, faculty, and student body who attended an Australian high school had no idea they had fossilized dinosaur footprints sitting in the main office for decades—they just thought the giant rock slab holding them was pretty.
Biloela State High School is located smack in the middle of Queensland, Australia. Anyone who worked at the school or attended for the past 20 years had probably, at one point or another, seen the big white slab of rock in the office. It’d been there since 2002 when it was discovered in a mine by a geologist named Wes Nichols, who donated it to the school because his wife worked there.
Decades later, Dr. Anthony Romilio from the University of Queensland’s Dinosaur Lab was contacted by Queensland locals after they suspected the patterns on the school’s white slab might’ve been left by dinosaurs. The folks who brought it to Dr. Romilio’s attention were not only correct, they also helped make one of the biggest dinosaur-related archaeological discoveries in Australian history.
The footprints date back around 200 million years, to the early Jurassic period. Paleontologists and geologists know there were dinosaurs all over Australia at the time; they just don’t have many skeletal remains from that stretch.
As Dr. Romilio told The Guardian, “We don’t have their bones but we know that they were around.” The slab now offers paleontologists some of the first physical evidence of the dinosaurs that roamed Australia during this period.
The white slab that sat in the school for over 20 years contains 66 fossilized footprints from 47 individual dinosaurs of the same species — Anomoepus scambus, a small herbivore with long legs, tiny arms, and a stocky body. Computer renderings of it found in a Google Image search bring up pictures that appear to depict a real-life Yoshi. The slab features 13 distinct trackways, and it’s believed that the footprints were made over days or weeks in mud, possibly near a river.
Dr. Romilio suggests that the unusual way the footprints were discovered is maybe not as unusual as you think, saying, “For the vast majority of fossils in Australia, most … are not found by palaeontologists – it’s other people raising their hand and asking: is this significant or not?”
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