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

During the early Jurassic period around 200 million years ago, Earth’s animals finally rebounded from one of the worst extinction events 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, 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 t ... Read full article.