Walking by where the dinos walked

 

Sometimes you just have to take a closer look at the ground (soil/sidewalk/rock) under your feet. Or in this case, the rock sitting in your school's entrance.

Look what happened when they did that at a school in Australia.

More than 60 dinosaur footprints found on boulder that sat at Queensland school for 20 years

That's the Guardian article, which you can read without having to pay for it.  Below is the Washington Post article, which if you haven't read too many other articles from, you might be able to read it. But I'll quote from that one. 

A rock sat in a school for years. Scientists say it’s a fossil jackpot.

"For two decades, Australian students walked by the 5-foot-long boulder in their school’s foyer unaware of its significance. When paleontologist Anthony Romilio finally inspected the roughly 200 million year old artifact in 2023, he had to remove a few pieces of chewed gum stuck to the sandstone before he could take a closer look."

So after a bit of preparation and processing to bring out the impressions of what was on the rock, this is what it looked like.

"Researchers determined the footprints belonged to the ichnospecies Anomoepus scambus. No bones for the possible species have been discovered, but paleontologists used fossilized traces — footprints and trackways — to determine the animal was probably a small, three-toed herbivore."

I had to look up ichnospecies, that was a new one for me. Here's what it means (from the San Joaquin Valley Geology Glossay of Trace Fossils page):

"Ichnogenera and Ichnospecies - The genus and species names of trace fossils are called ichnogenera and ichnospecies, and paleontologists since the early 1800s have been assigning these names to traces in the same way they are given to plants and animals. In addition, attempts are made from time to time to further organize ichnogenera into a Linnaean-type system of classes, orders and families, but these efforts largely fail for the simple reason that trace fossil names refer only to the form of the burrow, and not to the animal that made it."