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Could the large blocks of sandstone that make up many of Brisbane’s monolithic buildings contain the fossilised footprints of dinosaurs?
Long before Albion was a sought-after, inner-city Brisbane suburb, characterised by historical homes and shopfronts, it was the site of a sprawling sandstone quarry.
As a teenager, Bruce Runnegar would explore Petrie’s Quarry with his Brisbane Grammar schoolmates.
A find he made in his senior year in July 1958 has put dinosaurs on the map – literally.
Runnegar strongly suspected he had found a fossilised dinosaur footprint, but carefully wrapping it up and carrying it home, he never imagined its national significance.
In the decades since, the quarry was filled in and replaced with suburban homes, while Runnegar went on to become an esteemed palaeontologist.
He kept the fossil in his personal collection for more than 60 years, taking it with him as he lectured around the world, including the University of California in Los Angeles, where it remained for four decades before being returned to Brisbane last year.
The 18.5-centimetre footprint has now been confirmed as Australia’s oldest dinosaur fossil, dating back some 230 million years, and the first found in an Australian capital city.
In 2021, Runnegar finally decided to have the fossil formally documented. He reached out to palaeontologist Anthony Romilio from the University of Queensland’s Dinosaur Lab.
At the time, Runnegar was still lecturing in Los Angeles, having shipped the fossil to the US along with his furniture and personal belongings.
“[Romilio] advised me on how to take photographs of the fossil in my garage in Los Angeles. I took lots of photos – gigabytes of them,” he said.
Romilio used the photographs and special software to create a 3D map of the fossil and form a cast of what the dinosaur footprint would have looked like.
“[Once] I was able to make the model, I knew we had something very, very special here,” Romilio said.
He has determined the dinosaur that left its footprint on Brisbane was a small, two-legged sauropodomorph, which stood roughly 75 to 80 centimetres tall at the hip and weighed about 140 kilograms.
It lived in the Late Triassic period, 230 million years ago, making it an ancestral form of the brontosaurus or brachiosaurus.
“It’s likely the dinosaur was walking through or alongside a waterway when it left the footprint before it was then preserved in sandstone, which was cut millions of years later to construct buildings across Brisbane,” Romilio said.
Brisbane’s heritage-listed GPO on Queen Street in the heart of the CBD was constructed with sandstone from the Albion quarry, the same site of the fossil discovery.
“Subsequent urban development has made the original site inaccessible, leaving this footprint as the only surviving dinosaur evidence from the area,” Romilio said.
“Without the foresight to preserve this material, Brisbane’s dinosaur history would still be completely unknown.
“This is the only dinosaur fossil to be found in an Australian capital city and shows how globally significant discoveries can remain hidden in plain sight.”
Runnegar has donated the fossil to the Queensland Museum, where it will be added to the University of Queensland’s collection to be used for research and education.
The discovery has been published in Alcheringa, An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.
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