Like all stories in paleontology, that of Lark Quarry – a world-famous dinosaur tracksite in Queensland, Australia - starts in the geologic past; in this instance, during the Cretaceous Period, about 98 million years ago. The cast of this tale consisted of about 150 dinosaurs, played by:
• One species of a large herbivorous dinosaur (an ornithopod), who was a mere bit actor, making a cameo appearance before the main act.
• Two species of small dinosaurs – one a theropod and the other an ornithopod – who made up most of the cast; and
• The star of the show, a tyrannosaur-sized theropod, who made a grand entrance toward its climatic finish.
The story is filled with dramatic flourishes, of a tranquil scene shattered by brutal carnivory, and of a quiet Cretaceous lakeshore becoming a killing ground. The former lakeshore, though, left no bodies, only tracks. So we have to reconstruct what happened there by using the oldest science known to humankind, ichnology: the study of modern and fossil traces.
A small sample of the 3,300 dinosaur tracks of Lark Quarry in Queensland, Australia, showing evidence for three species of dinosaurs that either walked or ran along a Cretaceous lakeshore 98 million years ago. Who made these tracks, what behaviors do they represent, and how were the trackmakers’s behaviors related to one another? That is the mystery – and now the controversy - of Lark Quarry.
