On a recent camping trip out to Winton, in central-west Queensland, I found out that this small outback town sits close to an extraordinary fossil site. Out in the jump-ups south-west of town, pressed into rock roughly 93 to 95 million years old, are more than 3,400 dinosaur footprints, according to Wikipedia’s article on the trackways. For decades, Lark Quarry was famous as the world’s only known record of a dinosaur stampede. Then a new generation of scientists took a closer look, and the story got a lot more interesting.
What is Lark Quarry?
Lark Quarry Conservation Park sits about 110 km south-west of Winton. Its centrepiece is the Dinosaur Stampede National Monument, a single slab of rock about 210 square metres in area, packed with three-toed footprints. A 2025 digital survey by palaeontologist Anthony Romilio, published in the journal Geobios, counted at least 3,436 of them on the exposed surface, as Wikipedia reports. That’s slightly more than the 3,300 usually quoted, and it doesn’t count pieces removed for museum displays.
When the tracks were made, this dry red country was a green, well-watered river floodplain. The footprints are protected inside a climate-controlled building, completed in 2002 at a cost of around $3.2 million, which keeps the temperature and humidity stable and stops water running over the rock. The site was added to the National Heritage List on 20 July 2004 for its rarity and research value.
There are no dinosaur bones at Lark Quarry. Everything you see is a trace: the moment, or moments, when animals walked through soft mud that later hardened and was buried. That’s what makes it special. Bones tell you what a dinosaur looked like, but footprints tell you what it was doing.
How it was found
The story starts in the 1960s with a local station manager, Glen Seymour, who came across fossil footprints at a nearby site now called Seymour Quarry. He was reportedly fossicking for opal at the time, and at first thought they were fossilised bird tracks. He showed them to local enthusiast Peter Knowles, and word eventually reached the Queensland Museum.
In 1976 and 1977, Mary Wade of the Queensland Museum and Tony Thulborn of the University of Queensland led a team of palaeontologists and volunteers in a major excavation. Working largely by hand, they removed more than 60 tonnes of rock to expose about 200 square metres of the footprint layer. The quarry is named after Malcolm Lark, a local volunteer who is said to have shifted more of that rock than anyone else.
The stampede story
Thulborn and Wade published their full interpretation in 1984, and it’s still the version on most signs and websites. A series of large footprints heads off to the south-west, while thousands of much smaller ones run mostly to the north-west.
Because footprints rarely match up with a known skeleton, palaeontologists give track types their own names. The smallest, chicken-sized prints were named Skartopus and put down to small meat-eaters. The slightly larger ones, from bantam to emu size, were named Wintonopus and attributed to small plant-eaters called ornithopods.
The large prints were interpreted as those of a big theropod, the group of meat-eating dinosaurs that includes Tyrannosaurus. Some of the small tracks were pressed into the large ones, so the small dinosaurs seemed to have passed after it. Thulborn and Wade estimated more than 150 small animals, all moving the same way at speed. Their conclusion was that a mixed group gathered at the water’s edge had been surprised by a predator and bolted past it in panic. It was such a vivid scene that Lark Quarry became known as the world’s only dinosaur stampede.
Did it inspire Jurassic Park?
You’ll often read that Lark Quarry inspired the scene in Jurassic Park where a herd of Gallimimus flees across a plain. The claim gets repeated everywhere. Even Romilio and Salisbury, the scientists who later challenged the stampede, wrote in The Conversation that Spielberg liked the story so much it inspired the scene. But as Wikipedia notes, a consultant to the film has denied that the tracks were the inspiration. It’s a good story for the campfire, but treat it as local legend rather than established fact.
The twist: swimming, not stampeding
Around 2010, University of Queensland palaeontologist Anthony Romilio and his supervisor, Steve Salisbury, began re-examining the site. Their work, published in three papers between 2011 and 2014, took the stampede apart piece by piece.
First, the big tracks. Compared with other dinosaur footprints, the proportions of the large prints looked more like a plant-eater than a meat-eater, perhaps something like Muttaburrasaurus, which lived in this part of Queensland at the time. In 2014, they built 3D models of the prints from photographs. These showed broad feet with flat, rounded toes, no sharp claw marks and no separate toe pads, which isn’t what you’d expect from a theropod. Without a predator, the stampede loses its villain.
Second, the small tracks. In a 2013 paper, Romilio, Ryan Tucker and Salisbury argued that the rock was laid down by a seasonal river, not a lake. Many of the small “footprints” are long, thin scratches, the kind made when the toe tips of a floating or wading animal scrape the bottom. They also found that Skartopus and Wintonopus prints overlap in shape and even turn up in the same trackway. Their conclusion, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, was that the small tracks were all made by one kind of small plant-eating dinosaur, which removes the mixed group of predators and prey altogether.
Third, the timing. This is my favourite part, because it reads like a crime scene. The 3D models showed raised rims of squashed mud around the big footprints, which form when ground is soaked but not underwater. Some of those rims are cut by drag marks, probably from floating vegetation, which means water covered the site after the big dinosaur had passed. And the small dinosaur tracks are printed over the top of those drag marks.
So the big animal, the floating debris and the small dinosaurs came through in that order, anywhere from hours to days apart. Their best explanation is a river that rose and fell gently while different dinosaurs crossed at different times.
The case for the stampede
It isn’t a closed case. Tony Thulborn rejected the new interpretation strongly. In a 2013 critique, he took issue with how the track outlines had been redrawn: the 1984 drawings had dotted sections where the edges were hard to make out, and Romilio and Salisbury had joined the dots.
In a 2017 paper in the journal Ichnos, titled “Running or swimming?”, he argued that the swimming idea relied on untestable assumptions, and that the evidence still supported a stampede and two different kinds of small track-maker. Other researchers have since kept Skartopus and Wintonopus as separate track types, following Thulborn. He died on 22 July 2025, aged 81, according to Wikipedia’s biography of Thulborn, so the argument has lost one of its original voices.
The debate has even been given the AI treatment. In 2022, a team including Romilio trained a neural network on around 1,500 footprints of known meat-eaters and plant-eaters, then showed it the large Lark Quarry tracks. It classed all but one as plant-eater tracks, although one footprint came out looking more like a meat-eater’s.
Later reviews have pointed out that the answer still depends on which outline of each footprint you feed in, the same problem the humans had been arguing over. Footprints are notoriously tricky to read, and there’s still no way to say for certain which dinosaur made which track.
What we can say for sure
Whichever side you favour, some things we can say for sure. Somewhere around 93 to 95 million years ago, a large number of small dinosaurs crossed this spot in or near water, as did at least one much larger dinosaur, and their tracks were buried quickly enough to survive.
At about 16 footprints per square metre, the density measured in Romilio’s 2025 survey and reported by Wikipedia, it’s a remarkably dense trackway. It isn’t the densest in Australia, though: blocks from Queensland’s older Precipice Sandstone carry more than 70 per square metre. As Salisbury put it after the 2014 paper, the new interpretation takes nothing away from the site’s beauty, scientific significance or heritage value.
Personally, I find the debate makes it more interesting, not less. Standing over the tracks, you can picture both scenes, and then decide for yourself which one you believe.
Visiting Lark Quarry
If you’re heading to Winton, Lark Quarry is well worth the drive. Here’s what to know before you go, based on Queensland Parks’ advice on visiting Lark Quarry safely.
The site is about 110 km south-west of Winton along the Winton-Jundah Road. Allow around two hours, because part of the road is unsealed and can be rough. A conventional vehicle can make it, although a 4WD is more comfortable. Rain anywhere in the catchment can cut the road, so check conditions with the Winton Visitor Information Centre or Winton Shire Council before you leave.
April to September is the most comfortable time to go. Summer days top 40°C, and the wet season brings flooding.
Entry to the park and its two walking tracks is free, but you can only see the footprints on a paid guided tour. Since April 2016, the tours have been run by the Australian Age of Dinosaurs, so check current tour times and book before you go.
If you want to stretch your legs, the 500 m Spinifex Circuit is an easy loop with views over the Mitchell grass downs. The 3.5 km Jump Up Loop is an unformed cross-country walk along the escarpment, best done early in the day.
Go outback-ready. There’s no fuel between Winton and Lark Quarry, so fill up in town, carry plenty of water, take your rubbish home, and let someone know your plans. With the drive there and back plus the tour, it’s a full day out, so start early.
More to see around Winton
Winton is often called Australia’s dinosaur capital, and the Australian Age of Dinosaurs museum, just outside town, is the main reason. It displays some of the most important dinosaur fossils found in Australia, and you can watch fossils being prepared in its laboratory. Queensland Parks’ guide to the region’s fossil sites is a good place to plan a longer trip.
The town has two other claims to fame. Banjo Paterson’s “Waltzing Matilda” is traditionally said to have been first performed in public at the North Gregory Hotel on 6 April 1895, though some historians have questioned the date. And Winton was the registered office of Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services, better known as Qantas, which held its first board meeting at the Winton Club on 10 February 1921. The club still stands.
If you stay overnight, look up. With no city glow for hundreds of kilometres, the night sky is spectacular, as I found out on my trip and wrote about in what is the Milky Way?
Footprints in time
Whether it was a stampede, a river crossing or something in between, Lark Quarry is one of those rare places where you can stand where dinosaurs stood and see exactly where they put their feet. These footprints in time are also a good reminder that science is never quite finished: one generation of researchers tells a story, the next tests it, and the rocks stay exactly where they are, waiting for the next question. If you like deep-time stories from this part of the world, see Zealandia, the lost continent hidden under the Pacific.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Lark Quarry Dinosaur Trackways
- Queensland Parks: Visiting Lark Quarry safely
- Queensland Parks: Dinosaurs and diprotodons, fossil mysteries of Queensland’s outback
- Romilio and Salisbury, The Conversation (2014): No dinosaur stampede at Lark Quarry, so what really happened?
- Romilio, Tucker and Salisbury (2013), Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: Reevaluation of the Lark Quarry dinosaur tracksite (James Cook University repository)
- Wikipedia: Richard A. (Tony) Thulborn
- Wikipedia: Qantas
- Wikipedia: Waltzing Matilda