A team of palaeontologists is halfway through a three-year project to document hundreds of dinosaur footprints that were left along the West Kimberley coast n Western Australia’s north about 130 million years ago. Team leader Steve Salisbury said this month’s field work had focused on using a drone to get a bird’s eye view of the track ways.
“It’s allowing us to get up above some of the more interesting track sites, and get lots of good video footage, which is really exciting, and lots of fun,” he said.
“The drone allows us to get as close as we need to and customise the imagery we want, which is proving to be really, really interesting.”
The vision will be fed into the sophisticated computer software that will eventually create 3D images of the dinosaur’s movements along the coast.
The track ways are preserved in stone along a 200-kilometre stretch of coast running north from Broom.
Some are large circular imprints left by sauropods, while others are more bird-like, three-toed theropod prints.
Documenting them can be a challenge because some are located within jagged rocks and would be unrecognisable to the untrained eye.
The team, from the University of Queensland, also has to contend with the area’s enormous tides, which not only erode the footprints but mean field trips have to be timed with precision.
Professor Salisbury said every round of field work was resulting in more footprints being discovered.
“There are a couple of new ones that have emerged on this trip, and sometimes it’s just mind-blowing just how much there is to document,” he said.
“What’s also been good about the trip is that we’ve been able to spend time carefully examining some track ways, and making sense of them.
“So that’s really helping bring the coastline to life, and bring the track sites to life, because they’re a record of what the dinosaurs were doing 130 million years ago.”
The project is due to wrap up by the end of 2016.
Top photo: Dinosaur prints, Gantheaume Point, Broome, Australia- Corbis
Middle photo: Damian Kelly
Source: ABC