WEST KIMBERLEY PLACE REPORT - Department of Sustainability ...

The National Heritage listed Lark Quarry site in Queensland preserves a 'dinosaur
stampede' and was among the best-preserved dinosaur trackways in the world, though
a recent accident may have damaged the bedding plane. As many as 4000 footprints
are preserved here, representing the tracks of as may as 150 dinosaurs (Thulborn
2009). Elsewhere in the Winton Formation, in which Lark Quarry is located, plant
micro– and macrofossils are also found, but the landscape preservation of in situ
plants that occurs in the Broome Sandstone is not matched. The taxonomic diversity
of the Lark Quarry tracks is low – the site preserves prints of groups of ornithopods
and small theropods running from a larger theropod predator at a single point in time.
By contrast, the Broome tracks originate from several stratigraphic horizons within
the Broome Sandstone so may represent slightly different time periods (Long 2004;
Thulborn 2009). No other track site in Australia provides the range of environmental
settings that are preserved in the Broome Sandstone – each with its own characteristic
ichnofauna (Thulborn 2009).
The Broome Sandstone exposed in the intertidal zone of the Dampier Coast provide a
glimpse of the places in which sauropods were living, and also records their
interaction with other dinosaur taxa in ways that body fossils cannot. Further, it
contains information about Mesozoic ecology that simply isn't preserved anywhere
else in the world. Tracks are particularly valuable as sources of behavioural data about
extinct animals. Body fossils of dinosaurs are invariably transported from the
environments in which the animals lived and as such palaeoecological reconstructions
based on these remains are usually focussed on characteristics such as body size and
diet. Footprints, especially those found in the Broome Sandstone, which in places
weave around fossilised plants still in their life positions, give us the opportunity to
glimpse the lives of these animals
The dinosaur tracks and associated ichnofossils, plant macrofossils and
Cretaceous depositional environments of the Broome Sandstone exposed in the
intertidal zone of the Dampier Coast have outstanding heritage value to the
nation under criterion (d) for preserving snapshots of the ecology of the
Mesozoic.
WEALTH OF THE LAND AND SEA
Camden Sound humpback whale calving area
The Kimberley is the northern migration destination and calving ground for the
largest population of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in the world (DEC
2009). Humpback whales travel thousands of kilometres to warm tropical waters to
mate and to calve. Two separate populations of humpback whales occur in Australian
waters: Group IV migrates along the west coast and Group V along the east coast.
Group IV is regarded as a single population while Group V consists of three subpopulations
whose migration destinations are eastern Australia, New Caledonia and
Tonga/Fiji (IWC 2005). All age classes participate in the migration, with pregnant
females the last to leave Antarctica, arriving at the calving grounds as some of the
earlier arrivals are preparing for the return migration south (Chittleborough 1965;
Dawbin 1997). Camden Sound may be the largest humpback whale nursery in the
world, with up to 1,000 whales recorded (Costin and Sandes 2009a, 2009b; DEC
2009). It is ecologically significant as one of many staging posts during the cyclical,
seasonal, continuous migration of the west coast (Group IV) humpbacks between their
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