WEST KIMBERLEY PLACE REPORT - Department of Sustainability ...

Other Australian track sites include the Ipswich Coal Measures, the Precipice
Sandstone, the Razorback Beds and Walloon Coal Measures, all in Queensland. These
range in age from the Late Triassic through Mid Jurassic and so are all older than both
the Dampier Coast and Lark Quarry sites. No more than three types of tracks are
preserved at any of these other sites and the taxa represented are interpreted to be
ornithipods and theropods (Thulborn 2009). None of these sites approaches either the
Dampier Coast or Lark Quarry for the numbers of prints preserved, nor do any of
them come close to the Dampier Coast for the geographic extent of the tracks. Alone
of the Australian track sites, the Dampier Coast preserves evidence of sauropods. The
Broome Sandstone tracks along the Dampier Coast are the best record of dinosaurs
from the western half of the continent and the large number and variety of tracks in a
range of depositional settings provides an otherwise unobtainable census (Thulborn
2009) of dinosaur populations and communities.
The Dampier Coast dinosaur tracks have outstanding heritage value to the
nation under criterion (b) as the best and most extensive evidence of dinosaurs
from the western half of the continent, some of which are unknown from body
fossils; for the diversity and exceptional sizes of the sauropod prints; and the
unique census of the dinosaur community that they provide.
Anecdotal reports indicate the presence of human footprints in Quaternary sediments
at a number of named coastal sites on the west of Dampier Peninsula north and east of
Broome. Media reports, several books and a major summary of footprint sites which
appeared in the journal Ichnos in 2001 indicate that ichnofossils stolen from the area
in 1996 included human footprints as well as dinosaur tracks (Mayor and Sarjeant
2001; CNN 1996; Long 1998; Long 2002; Thulborn 2009). A paper by Welch (1999)
identifies a trackway elsewhere on the Dampier Coast of ten footprints, with an
eleventh print a short distance away, preserved on a beachrock shelf, probably
representing the passage of two people. Beachrock is consolidated or semiconsolidated
'sandstone' which forms when seawater-derived chemicals cement beach
sand at the intertidal zone along beaches and shorelines (Welch 1999). Welch
reported another footprint site nearby that is now covered by sand and mud.
Despite the compelling prospect that the presence of human and dinosaur ichnofossils
along the same coast vindicates Jules Verne and the makers of the Flintstones, they
are preserved in very different aged sediments. The beachrock in which the human
prints occur has been dated using optical spin luminescence to about 2000 years ago,
setting a maximum age for the walkers (Welch 1999). The dinosaur tracks have been
dated to the early Cretaceous, around 130 million years ago, although they do not all
occur in the same stratigraphic layer.
Track sites like the Pleistocene Lake Garnpung footprint site in the Willandra Lakes
World Heritage Area, which preserves more than 800 footprints, capture behavioural
and population data for a group of people living in arid inland Australia at the height
of the last glacial stage. The prints represent more than 20 individual trackways from
adults, adolescents and children, as well as some marsupials and birds over an area of
around 700 metres squared (Webb et al. 2006; Westaway 2010). Such sites begin to
paint a picture of the human experience of the last glacial maximum.
The late Holocene Dampier Coast trackway documented by Welch is significantly
138