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

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

During the early Jurassic period around 200 million years ago, Earth’s
animals finally rebounded from one of the worst extinction events
<https://www.britannica.com/science/Jurassic-Period> 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
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08912963.2025.2472153#abstract>,
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
<https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2025/02/dozens-of-3-toed-dinosaurs-leave-their-mark-queensland>.
“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.

https://gizmodo.com/this-high-school-rock-is-teeming-with-dinosaur-footprints-but-no-one-noticed-for-decades-2000575447