First footprints in Rosewood dinosaur display

22 November 2018

Ipswich City Council has commenced works on the Rosewood Dinosaur Project in Johnston Park.

Workers beat the forecast rain for Thursday with a concrete pour to set the bone and egg nest into the wet cement.  At the same time, staff stamped the semi-cured concrete with the two dinosaur foot prints and then sculpted and aged them as the concrete cured.

Infrastructure Services Department Acting Chief Operating Officer Tony Dileo said council officers will return on Tuesday 27 November to install an adult and two juvenile dinosaurs. These pieces will be chemset bolted into place and be the main attraction, which will be free to the public to view.

The idea was first mooted in 2016 and subject matter experts were able to confirm the previous discovery of dinosaur footprints in the mines/collieries around Rosewood.

“Once the scope of works was confirmed (which includes one adult dinosaur, two juveniles, one egg nest, one femur bone seat and a cast of the actual dinosaur footprint located in the colliery) procurement for the supply and install of the display was coordinated,” Mr Dileo said.

Council engaged with Dr Anthony Romilio, an expert on dinosaur tracks, from the University of Queensland, to confirm the size and shape of the dinosaurs based on the footprint and similar ones located in both Australia and Argentina.

The Queensland Museum provided photographs of the footprints.

About the Display

This is a reconstruction of a theropod (‘meat-eater’) dinosaur that lived in the Rosewood area during the Middle Jurassic, more than 165 million years ago. Evidence for the occurrence of Rosewood dinosaurs and in neighbouring areas (Dinmore, Oakey) comes not in the form of fossil bones but rather fossilised footprints.

The Rosewood fossils are contained in rock located below ground (up to 140 metres below the surface) and were discovered in the 1930s-1990s during tunnel-mining for coal. Nearly a dozen Rosewood underground mines are known to have contained dinosaur footprints, most notably are the Lanefield, Westvale, Oakleigh, Roughrigg collieries. While all are closed, part of structural building for the Roughrigg colliery still stands.

Interestingly, these fossil dinosaur footprints have been found not as depressions into the rock but as footprint ‘infill’. The impressions left by the dinosaurs were made on thick mats of fallen leaf debris, which was later covered by sediment-ladened water. Over time these layers became rock. The vegetation debris became coal, and when removal during tunnel-mining, the footprint infills became revealed along the ceiling of the mines.

Theropod footprints are the most common dinosaur fossil in the Rosewood area and may reflect that Rosewood’s ancient swamp settings were a preferred environment for these meat-eater dinosaurs. These fossils are referrable to the Eubrontes dinosaur-footprint-name, which have three toe impressions and resemble massive bird tracks up to 50 cm in length that were formed by animals with legs over 2-metres long. In one Rosewood mine, a 5-metre-long trackway has also been observed, likely formed by a dinosaur that was walking.

Additionally, footprints from ornithopod dinosaurs are also known from Rosewood. These track-makers were two-legged plant-eaters but of much smaller size (footprints up to 20 cm in length) and are much less common than other fossil tracks.

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