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For more than 50 years, giant fossilized footprints have been one of the most exciting finds in Australian paleontology.
At the time of their discovery, scientists believed that the three-bird-like path was made by a two-legged predator between 200 million and 250 million years ago. The tracks were the first evidence that dinosaurs roamed Australia during the Triassic period, when creatures first appeared on the planet.
until 2003, even some paleontologists suspected that the footprints represent the world’s oldest evidence of a giant carnivorous dinosaur that may have grown up to 6-½ feet high at the hip.
But new analyzes have smashed this Australian idol. The scientists said the tracks belonged not to a wild giant carnivore, but to a smaller, docile herbivore no taller than a human. An article published on Thursday In the journal Historical Biology.
Anthony Romilio, a research fellow at the University of Queensland Dinosaur Laboratory and co-author of the new study, said that while antipodes are losing their claim to carnivorous Triassic dinosaur fame, the prints are still an important addition to Australia’s paleontological record. . The tracks probably belonged to a bipedal ancestor of giant, long-necked, quadrupedal sauropods that evolved later in the Mesozoic Era.
Dr. “The only occurrence in Australia of these bipedal forms of these dinosaurs,” said Romilio. Sauropods are absent from the continent’s fossil record for another 50 million years or so.
The first to notice the pressures were miners working in a tunnel about 700 feet below the Earth’s surface near Brisbane. Fossilized tracks, each the size of a dinner plate, formed in the dark as the miners excavated the coal.
Dr. “Having a bird footprint, having a giant bird footprint on the ceiling – that’s something to tell someone,” Romilio said.
Reports of mysterious tracks came out of the mine. In a 1964 paper on the discovery, paleontologist Henry Ross Edgar Staines of the Queensland Geological Survey and JT Woods of the Queensland Museum measured the largest mark at about 17 inches from the heel to the tip of the longest toe. They declared it as Eubrontes, a genus of fossilized footprints left by upright carnivores. A plaster cast of the print has been displayed at the Queensland Museum.
After the mine was closed, this cast and a simple, cartoon-like drawing of the three footprints featured in the 1964 paper were the only visual recordings of the tracks the researchers had access to. Dr. Over the years scientific publications have described the largest print as between 15 and 18 inches, Romilio said.
Dr. A number of inconsistencies with these previous calculations emerged when Romilio and colleagues analyzed the cast using advanced 3D imaging techniques. The indentations on the front of the print looked like scuff marks left by dinosaur claws, not impressions of the claws themselves. A protrusion near the heel that previous researchers had measured as part of the foot was actually part of the rock surrounding the fossil.
Further comparison showed that the tracks shared more characteristics with Evazoum, a genus of plant-eating dinosaur prints, than with the carnivorous Eubrontes: an introverted gait, a shorter middle finger, broad fingers, and a narrower overall toe. Researchers now believe the largest track was 13 inches long and belonged to a dinosaur that stood about 4½ feet high at the hip.
Paleontologist Ross Staines, who first published the prints, died in 1996. His daughter Dr. Roslyn Dick believes she will welcome the new understanding of her findings.
Brisbane dentist Dr. “My father would have been delighted if someone else had taken his job and done more research on the matter,” Dick said, saying that Mr. Staines always kept a geologist’s pick in the trunk of his family car. impromptu fossil excavations. “My father loved getting things done well and appreciated the scientific process to reveal the ‘truth’.”
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