For 20 years, this school had no idea it owned a dinosaur fossil
Students at a school in Australia studied next to a boulder without realizing it was a fossil of 66 footprints from 47 dinosaurs from 200 million years ago.
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.
Dinosaur footprints discovered on a boulder outside a school in Queensland, Australia. University of Queensland“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
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