Sarah Kaplan in an article today in the Washington Post writes on
a report published on Friday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology
by Salisbury et. al. on a multi-year study of dinosaur footprints in the
coastal region north of Broome.
There are thousands of marks along the 25km stretch of coastline
which have been known about by people for millennia.
The study has shown evidence for at east 21 different species and casts
were made of what is claimed to be the largest dinosaur footprint in the
world.
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Originally Posted by Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post
“The tracks provide a snapshot, a census if you will, of an extremely diverse dinosaur fauna,” lead author Steve Salisbury, a paleontologist at the University of Queensland, told Gizmodo. “Twenty-one different types of dinosaurs all living together at the same time in the same area. We have never seen this level of diversity before, anywhere in the world. It’s the Cretaceous equivalent of the Serengeti. And it’s written in stone.”
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Salisbury, et. al. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology
Extensive and well-preserved tracksites in the coastally exposed Lower Cretaceous (Valanginian–Barremian) Broome Sandstone of the Dampier Peninsula provide almost the entire fossil record of dinosaurs from the western half of the Australian continent. Tracks near the town of Broome were described in the late 1960s as Megalosauropus broomensis and attributed to a medium-sized theropod trackmaker. Brief reports in the early 1990s suggested the occurrence of at least another nine types of tracks, referable to theropod, sauropod, ornithopod, and thyreophoran trackmakers, at scattered tracksites spread over more than 80 km of coastline north of Broome, potentially representing one of the world's most diverse dinosaurian ichnofaunas. More recently, it has been proposed that this number could be as high as 16 and that the sites are spread over more than 200 km. However, the only substantial research that has been published on these more recent discoveries is a preliminary study of the sauropod tracks and an account of the ways in which the heavy passage of sauropod trackmakers may have shaped the Dampier Peninsula's Early Cretaceous landscape. With the other types of dinosaurian tracks in the Broome Sandstone remaining undescribed, and the full extent and nature of the Dampier Peninsula's dinosaurian tracksites yet to be adequately addressed, the overall scientific significance of the ichnofauna has remained enigmatic.
At the request of the area's Goolarabooloo Traditional Custodians, 400+ hours of ichnological survey work was undertaken from 2011 to 2016 on the 25 km stretch of coastline in the Yanijarri–Lurujarri section of the Dampier Peninsula, inclusive of the coastline at Walmadany (James Price Point). Forty-eight discrete dinosaurian tracksites were identified in this area, and thousands of tracks were examined and measured in situ and using three-dimensional photogrammetry.
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The Dinosaurian Ichnofauna of the Lower Cretaceous (Valanginian–Barremian) Broome Sandstone of the Walmadany Area
(James Price Point), Dampier Peninsula, Western Australia" by Salisbury et. al. paper here -
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/...4.2016.1269539
Washington Post story here :-
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.23316336fad6
