Geoscience Reference
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grapherandnaturalist,identifiedthemasdinosaurtracks.Ialsocan'thelpbutthink,
though,that theindigenous people ofthis area andotherparts ofAustralia, manyof
whom were expert trackers, probably also noticed these marks of long-gone animal
life in the Cretaceous rocks, perhaps incorporating these trace fossils into Dream-
time stories.
Although this might seem odd to people outside of paleontology, nine years
passed from the discovery of this world-class tracksite until paleontologists arrived
to evaluate them. Nonetheless, this lag time reflected the reality of how long it took
news to travel from rural Queensland to the “ivory towers” of academia, especially
in the days before such academics could be contacted more easily by e-mail. The
only hint of the trace fossils' presence was conveyed a few years after their discov-
ery. In this instance, Ron McKenzie, a station hand of Mr. Seymour's, took natural
casts of the tracks to the Queensland Museum and had them confirmed as dinosaur
tracks.
Otherwise,nothingmuchinascientificsortofwayhappeneduntil1971,when
Mr.McKenzieandMr.Knowlestookpaleontologiststothesite:RichardT.Tedford
of the American Museum of Natural History, Alan Bartholomai of the Queensland
Museum, Patricia (Pat) Vickers-Rich of Monash University, and her husband Tho-
mas (Tom) Rich of the Museum of Victoria. Nonetheless, despite the presence of
so many prominent paleontologists in that part of Queensland, they weren't there
to look at dinosaur tracks. Instead, they were prospecting for body fossils of Creta-
ceous mammals, whose remains are much smaller and rarer than dinosaur tracks.
Nonetheless, the tracks, mentioned by Mr. Knowles in conversation with the pale-
ontologists,madeforaninterestingnon-mammalianfossildiversion,andtheyread-
ily agreed to look at the site where the tracks had been discovered.
Once these paleontologists visited this place with Mr. Knowles, Dr. Tedford,
throughapplicationofhiswell-practicedgeologicalreasoning,tracedthesmallout-
crop of the track-bearing layer into an adjoining hillside. He figured that the strat-
um continued underneath the surface of the hill, which they tested by walking to
