For 20 years, students and teachers at Biloela State High School in Australia studied and worked next to a beige boulder without realizing it was a window into a lost world.
In 2021, following media coverage of dinosaur remains in the area, someone thought to have an expert look at the big rock sitting in foyer of the school in Queensland, eastern Australia. The boulder was covered in what looked like chicken feet — if those chickens were big and had only three toes.
That’s when paleontologist Anthony Romilio came to the high school to examine the boulder and its unusual markings.
“I thought, ‘Yes, it’s a small boulder, so I can just lift it up.’ But oh my goodness, it was so heavy so I had to rethink this,” Romilio told NBC News in a phone interview Wednesday.
“They did not know that this was an actual fossil itself,” said Romilio, a research associate at the University of Queensland’s Dinosaur Lab and co-author of research published online Monday in the Historical Biology journal
He went on to identify 66 fossilized footprints from 47 individual dinosaurs left during the early Jurassic period, nearly 200 million years ago.
“It’s a huge number of dinosaurs, and it’s the highest number found in a single slab in Australia,” he said.
The school’s deputy principal, David Hall, told the The Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Romilio’s discoveries had been a shock, but also “a bit exciting.”
“It sits in a very public area in our student foyer and our kids walk past it every day, and so do we,” he said.
He added that the school had ended up with the boulder about 20 years ago when a geologist who was married to one of the school’s teachers came across it in a nearby mine.
“That area was going to be blasted or disturbed with the mining activities, and he saved that specimen and donated it to the school,” Hall added, according to ABC.
After seeing the remarkable rock at the school, Romilio decided to dig into the matter further, and drove to a nearby coal mine in Callide. There, another open-air secret confronted him.
“As I am coming into the car park, there was this massive boulder with another massive dinosaur footprint that’s just staring at you,” he said.
“And just my jaw dropped,” he said, and remembers thinking: “This is incredible.”
The boulder at the mine contained two footprints, one that was obvious and another half broken and hidden with mud. Together with a third rock that is part of a private collection and encased in resin, researchers have been able to piece together an ancient history of the area.
These records are a critical window into the Jurassic period in Australia, when “the most common dinosaur fossils are footprints, by several orders of magnitude,” Romilio said.
For now, the school boulder remains where it is, and discussions are underway for it to be relocated to a more public venue.
“It’s a part of their community and really a part of their heritage,” Romilio said.