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66 Dinosaur Footprints Found on Rock at an Australian High School

Learn more about the schoolyard dinosaur discovery, which found 200-million-year-old fossilized footprints on a boulder from Australia’s Early Jurassic period hiding in plain sight.

BySam Walters
The footprints were left around 200 million years ago, when small dinosaurs walked along or across an Australian waterway.Image Credit: Anthony Romilio, The University of Queensland

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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 ...

  • Sam Walters

    Sam Walters is the associate editor at Discover Magazine who writes and edits articles covering topics like archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution, and manages a few print magazine sections.

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