We set the alarm for 6:30am and that is when we got up. Today was a special day with someone having a birthday.
Today was another bucket list item with a visit to Lark Quarry or as it is known now, the Lark Quarry Conservation Park.
We took our friends with us on the drive to Lark Quarry which is about 110klm each way on a combination of sealed and unsealed roads. We had booked for a midday tour and decided to leave at 9:00am knowing that we would be early, but we allowed for any contingency. It took us a little over 1.5 hours to drive there and we had coffee before the tour. Excluding us, the rest of the group, 8 members, went on a 30-minute walk that focused on the vista of the area. They did not see any dinosaur relics during the walk.
At midday, we saw a couple of short films about Lark Quarry and following the films, we were taken inside the building that protects the footprints left by the dinosaur stampede. It was good learning about the history of the site which is unique across the planet.
The web site for Lark Quarry states the following.
“95 million years ago Lark Quarry was part of a great river plain, with sandy channels, swamps, and lakes brimming with freshwater mussels, lungfish, and crocodiles. Rainfall was over a metre per year, so the surrounding lowland forest was lush and green.
On the day our drama unfolds, some 95 million years ago, herds of small two-legged dinosaurs came to drink at the lake. There were at least 150 dinosaurs of two different kinds – carnivorous coelurosaurs about the size of chickens, and slightly larger plant-eating ornithopods, some of them as large as emus.
A huge meat-eating theropod, smaller than a Tyrannosaurus, approached the lake. It slowed, saw the other dinosaurs gathered at the water’s edge and began to stalk, then turned and charged. The stampeding herd of smaller dinosaurs left a chaotic mass of footprints in the mud as they ran to escape.
The site where the dinosaur footprints were found was once a streambed leading into a lake. The water level had dropped, exposing mudflats. When the dinosaur stampeded, they left perfect footprints in the half-dried and still plastic mud. Sun, wind, and rain would normally destroy tracks like this. But just a few days after the footprints were made, it began to rain and the lake rose gently, covering the tracks with sandy sediments before the mud had dried enough to crack. The next flood buried them below a meter of sand and a meter of mud. Over time, more sediment was laid down. As millions of years passed, the sediment layers were compressed to form rock and a low range eventually formed.
Local Station Manager, Glen Seymour, first discovered the Dinosaur Trackways in the 1960s. He thought they were fossilised bird tracks and showed them to local enthusiast Peter Knowles. What they were looking at was, and still is today, the world’s only recorded evidence of a dinosaur stampede.
It wasn’t until scientists visited the area in 1971 that the Trackways story began to unfold. Although the scientists were looking for Cretaceous mammals, Peter showed them the dinosaur tracks as a matter of interest. The last period of the Mesozoic era, around 146 to 65 million years ago. Many dinosaurs and other organisms died out at the end of this era.
Five years later, palaeontologists and volunteers began the task of removing rock to expose the Trackways layer.
In the years that followed, the Trackways began to deteriorate and palaeontologists from Queensland Museum raised concerns about the possible loss of the Trackways unless action was taken to stabilise and protect them from further damage.
A new conservation building, funded by Queensland Heritage Trails Network, was erected in 2002.
Fossilised footprints would not tell us much without scientific interpretation. Scientists used mathematics, comparisons and inspired guesswork to uncover the story of the Trackways.
Back in the lab, scientists studied each footprint print on a latex mould taken from the site. The footprints were measured and described, and (where individual tracks could be followed) pace length, stride length and pace angulation were measured.
Scientists then compared the footprints to dinosaur skeletons from all over the world with feet roughly matching the Lark Quarry tracks.
The dinosaur running speeds were worked out using equations based on locomotion of living animals, incorporating size, weight and flexibility differences.
Once the scientists knew which dinosaurs made the tracks, how many there were and how fast they were moving, they were able piece together the stampede story.”
Returning to Winton, we took our friends grocery shopping before returning to the caravan park. Some of the dust was removed from the rear of the vehicle before our usual happy hour. She was given a cake for her birthday.
We had leftovers for tea before watching the State of Origin rugby league game.