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matched perfectly, although the one he was flipping was upside-down, its upper-
most surface hidden from view. We ran over to help, and soon we were looking at
its other side.
We gaped accordingly, as on the top surface of the rock were more dinosaur
tracks. I pulled a small brush from out of my field vest and cleaned off the beach
sand from the rock surface, and we stared at the lithified sand from a Cretaceous
river floodplain, some of which had molded into the three-toed shapes of dinosaur
feet. Just three hours beforehand, when we first descended onto Milanesia Beach,
only two confirmed dinosaur tracks had been found in the Eumeralla Formation of
western Victoria, and four in all of southern Australia. We now had twenty-four in
front of us. You could say we were having a good day.
The most brilliant methods are often the simplest, and the one Greg used for
finding the tracks handily fulfilled that dictum. He had noticed the thickness of the
first block, as well as its thinly interlayered sandstones and siltstones. Within these
alternating layers—a little more than halfway down its thickness—was a gray silt-
stone, looking much like a different flavor in an otherwise monochrome layer cake.
He then glanced around to see if any other nearby boulders shared those traits, and
matched one with the one I had discovered. Seeing that the gray siltstone bed was
less than halfway down its thickness, he correctly surmised that it was wrong side
up, and intuited that the dinosaur tracks could be on its top surface. He was right.
However, there was little time to revel and otherwise pat each other on our
backs,asitwasnowmid-afternoononanear-winterday.Thismeantwewerelosing
our sunlight, and we still had a long uphill hike ahead of us back to the car park.
Tom quickly measured the second slab's dimensions and figured out its weight.
He reckoned it was about 400 kg (880 lbs), smaller than the first one but still too
massive for any (or all) of us to haul up the trail.
I hurriedly photographed the overall surface and started sketching the forms
andlocationsofthetracksonthesurface.Ialsonotedanysimilaritiesordifferences
between these newly found tracks and the ones found a few hours earlier. One of
