In 1958, an Australian teenager named Bruce Runnegar uncovered a mysterious dinosaur footprint during a visit to a quarry with school friends. He kept the fossil for years, eventually becoming a paleontologist himself. Over six decades later, the prehistoric print is now ready for its close-up.
Runnegar gave the fossil to a team at the University of Queensland’s Dinosaur Lab, where they believe that the roughly 7-inch, fossilized footprint was made by a small, two-legged dinosaur, most likely an early sauropodomorph. These primitive relatives of later long-neck dinosaurs lived during the Late Triassic to Late Cretaceous.
Importantly, the footprint is also the oldest dinosaur fossil in Australia. It dates back about 230 million years to the earliest part of the Late Triassic period when Australia was part of the supercontinent Gondwana. The print is detailed in a study published in the journal Alcheringa and shows that dinosaurs were Down Under much earlier than paleontologists previously believed.
“This is the only dinosaur fossil to be found in an Australia capital city and shows how globally significant discoveries can remain hidden in plain sight,” study co-author and paleontologist Dr. Anthony Romilio said in a statement. “Subsequent urban development has made the original site inaccessible, leaving this footprint as the only surviving dinosaur evidence from the area.”
The team believes that the dinosaur was likely walking alongside a waterway when it left its footprint behind. The print was then preserved in sandstone for millions of years, before the stone was cut to build buildings across the city of Brisbane.
“Without the foresight to preserve this material, Brisbane’s dinosaur history would still be completely unknown,” said Romilio.
Based on the size, the sauropodomorph stood roughly 2.4 to 2.6 feet tall at the hip and weighed just over 300 pounds.
Runnegar is now an honorary professor at the University of Queensland after teaching at University of New England at Armidale and UCLA. While in the United States, he showed the fossil footprint he discovered as a teen in Brisbane to his students.
“At the time, we suspected the marks might be dinosaur tracks, but we couldn’t have imagined their national significance,” added Runnegar. “It was a great example of a special kind of trace fossil because the footprint was made in sediment by a heavy animal. When I saw Dr. Romilio’s ability to reconstruct, analyse and map dinosaur footprints, I decided to reach out to have the fossil formally documented.”
The fossil is now at the Queensland Museum where it will be available for ongoing research.
