Qualla: Lark Quarry Dinosaur Trackways

Lark Quarry Dinosaur Trackways: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philarazzi, CC BY-SA 4.0. More than three thousand footprints crowd a single slab of rock the size of a small house, a chaos of three-toed impressions left when these were not stone but soft grey mud on the edge of a Cretaceous waterway. For decades the standard reading was thrillingly cinematic: a hungry predator stalks toward a flock of small dinosaurs at the water's edge, they panic, and a hundred and fifty of them bolt in a single terrified surge, stamping their flight into the ground forever. It was called the world's only recorded dinosaur stampede. The trouble is, the more closely scientists have looked, the less sure anyone has become about what actually happened here.

Image: Philarazzi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lark Quarry Dinosaur Trackways: A Moment in the Mud

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Me whynot, CC BY-SA 3.0. The tracks belong to the Winton Formation, sandstone laid down roughly 95 million years ago, when central-western Queensland was not desert but a low, green floodplain laced with rivers, swamps, and forest. Two distinct sizes of small footprint dominate the slab, made by chicken-...

Image: Me whynot | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lark Quarry Dinosaur Trackways: The Stampede on Trial

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patrick Murphy, CC BY-SA 4.0. The original interpretation, built in the 1970s, cast the big trackmaker as a predatory theropod that triggered the panic. Later research complicated nearly every part of that story. In the 1990s, reanalysis suggested the large prints might belong not to a meat-eater but to a big...

Image: Patrick Murphy | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lark Quarry Dinosaur Trackways: Sixty Tonnes of Rock

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Me whynot, CC BY-SA 3.0. However it formed, getting to it was its own epic. A station manager named Glen Seymour first noticed dinosaur footprints in the area in the 1960s. In 1976 and 1977, palaeontologists from the Queensland Museum and the University of Queensland, among them Mary Wade and Tony Thulbo...

Image: Me whynot | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lark Quarry Dinosaur Trackways: A House Built Over Deep Time

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit fanningm3d photo by Mick Fanning, CC BY-SA 4.0. Footprints that survived 95 million years underground proved alarmingly fragile once exposed to Queensland weather. An early shelter slowed the damage but did not stop it, so in 2002 a purpose-built Conservation Building was raised over the trackways, stabilising temperature and ...

Image: fanningm3d photo by Mick Fanning | CC BY-SA 4.0