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 tracks, in a press release. “It’s an unprecedented snapshot of dinosaur abundance, movement, and behavior from a time when no fossilized dinosaur bones have been found in Australia.”
