Qualla: Tumblagooda Sandstone

Tumblagooda Sandstone: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Run your hand across the right slab of rock near Kalbarri and you can touch a footprint older than forests, older than backbones on land, older than nearly anything that has ever walked. The Tumblagooda Sandstone preserves trackways - twin rows of little paddle-shaped dents marching across the stone for metres at a time - left by arthropods that hauled themselves out of the water and across damp sand more than 430 million years ago. There are no skeletons to speak of. Almost nothing here is a body. What survives is the evidence of movement: walking, burrowing, ploughing, the raw verbs of early life recorded in a rock that does not remember the creatures, only what they did.

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Tumblagooda Sandstone: A Beach Before Bones

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Picture the scene the rock describes. Broad, braided rivers spilling sand across a plain, feeding into shallow tidal flats and, at times, into windblown dunes. This was the early Silurian, roughly 430 million years ago, when Western Australia sat pressed against Antarctica near t...

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Tumblagooda Sandstone: The Trackways

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The headline acts are the walking traces. The most common, named Diplichnites, are paired rows of pits that can run across a rock surface for many metres - the patient stride of a many-legged animal crossing open ground. Some appear to have been made above the waterline, which is...

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Tumblagooda Sandstone: The Only Body in the Rock

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For all its abundant trackways, the Tumblagooda has yielded essentially one creature's actual remains: Kalbarria, a small early arthropod named for the town, carrying eleven pairs of legs. Bodies almost never fossilised here, and the reason is its own small story. The sand was co...

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Tumblagooda Sandstone: Reading What Cannot Be Dug Up

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pinning an age on the formation has been a century-long argument. Early guesses ran from the Cretaceous to the Cambrian; later work using spores, microscopic acritarchs, tooth-like conodonts and the magnetism frozen into the rock pulled the estimate toward the Silurian and Ordovi...

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