Dinosaur footprints preserved in rocks are rare in Australia. These footprints located on publicly-owned land in Broome can be easily accessed from Gantheaume Point. There are walk trails down to the flat sandstone rocks on which the footprints are preserved. Information about the location of the precise location of the footprints is difficult to find. When we visited the area there were about fifty people looking around for them until somebody yelled out that they had found them; apparently this occurs everyday at low tide in tourist season. They can only be seen at low tide and care should be taken with young and old alike on the rocks that may be slippy. They are a wondrous sight that should be a must on everyone's visit to Broome. The dinosaur footprints are located in the geological formation known as Broome Sandstone of which the cliff exposed at Gantheaume Point is the type section. It consists of flat-lying red, yellow and white fine to medium grained micaceous sandstone and minor mudstone. The Broome Sandstone reaches 280 m in water bores in the Broome area but only about 12 m is exposed at the type section (at low tide). The formation of such tracks started with an ordinary walk on the beach. Millions of years ago, dinosaurs left their tracks in sediment. Typically, the soil was wet -- part of a shoreline, a mudflat or even the bottom of a shallow sea. As the area dried, the tracks hardened. Eventually, another layer of sediment filled the prints, protecting them from erosion or damage. Over millions of years, these layers of sediment hardened into sedimentary rock -- the same type of rock that preserves dinosaurs' fossilized bones. Then, over another long time span, erosion, weathering and geological forces gradually revealed the buried tracks. For a track made tens of millions of years ago to survive until the present, several specific steps had to happen. The sediment the dinosaurs walked through needed to be just the right texture -- not too soft and not too hard. Prints in very wet soil would collapse on themselves, and walking in hard soil didn't make much of an impression. It also helped when the sediment that filled the tracks fell slowly and was a different type than the one on the ground. And, of course, geological events must have combined in just such a way to make the tracks visible today. (Source: Geological Survey of Western Australia)
In order to claim this cache you must answer the following questions:
1. What age are the dinosaur footprints?
2. There are a few types of dinosaur footprints found in the Broome area. At GZ what species of dinosaur footprints are found and how many toes do they have?
3. When were the footprints found?
4. Estimate how tall the dinosaur would be that made these particular footprints?
5. Were the dinosaurs that made the footprints carnivores, omnivores or herbivores?
Congratulations to GeoSqueaks on (legitimate) FTF!
STOP PRESS: More prints can be found at S17 58.439 E122 10.562 (courtesy of Flintstone's)