Story highlights Freshly uncovered footprints found on a busy Western Australian beach

Paleontologist says they may have come from four-meter long carnivore

(CNN) Everyone knows you have to watch out for sharks on Australian beaches -- but what about dinosaurs?

A 130-million year old dinosaur footprint has been found among the seaweed and surf on popular Cable Beach near the town of Broome, Western Australia.

Bindi Lee Porth told CNN she was collecting seashells when she felt an indent in the sand. Clearing it away, she found a number of massive, preserved footprints.

"I've been down there every night with tourists, kids, locals. I've been getting kids to stand in them and walk along the tracks of the dinosaurs," she said.

"It's unbelievable to stand in the tracks, close your eyes and put yourself back there in time. It's very hard to describe, it's just amazing."

Read More </s> (CNN) Everyone knows you have to watch out for sharks on Australian beaches -- but what about dinosaurs?

A 130-million year old dinosaur footprint has been found among the seaweed and surf on popular Cable Beach near the town of Broome, Western Australia.

Bindi Lee Porth said she was collecting seashells when she felt an indent in the sand. Clearing it away, she found a number of massive, preserved footprints.

"(I'm) amazed. To be connected to something from so many millions and millions of years ago is fantastic, we're pretty happy. The kids didn't believe me at first, but I was right," she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Porth said she had been on the beach dozens of times before without seeing any dinosaur footprints.

One of a number of footprints found along the beach.

University of Queensland palaeontologist Steve Salisbury told CNN the tracks had probably been covered by sand or water for decades, but erratic tides at Cable Beach had finally revealed them.

He said the tracks were called Megalosaurus Broomensis and they were probably made by a medium-sized carnivore.

"It was a type of theropod dinosaur, a carnivorous one," he said. "The tracks are about 30 to 50 centimeters (1 to 1.6 feet) long so we can tell the dinosaur was probably about 1.5 meters (5 feet) high at the hips and maybe 2.5 to 4 meters (8 to 13 feet) long."

Dinosaur tracks have been part of Aboriginal mythology, known as Dreamtime, in the area for generations.

"This particular spot, for instance, is known to have tracks on it and is called the Place of the Emu Man," Salisbury said, referring to the three-toed tracks similar to emu footprints.

Other footprints found include those of the stegosaurus and the enormous, herbivorous brontosaurus.

According to Salisbury, the rock which holds the footprints is stronger than the layers above it, which have washed away over the years to expose the footprints to the air once again.

"As it weathers away we start to see these ancient surfaces emerge. What you're essentially seeing are surfaces that are frozen in time and were walked over by dinosaurs millions of years ago," he said. </s> Dinosaur footprints dating back to the cretaceous period have been uncovered on a beach in far-north Western Australia after being buried in sand for almost 50 years.

The three-toed tracks were found on Cable beach in Broome, 2,240km north of Perth, on Sunday, when a woman who was collecting shells with her family felt an indent beneath her foot.

“So I just sort of brushed all the sand away and it’s revealed this beautiful, like a bird, foot,” Broome woman Bindi Lee Porth told the ABC.

It’s the first time these particular tracks have been reported since 1974 but they are familiar to the Indigenous peoples of the Dampier peninsula.

To the Goolarabooloo they are the tracks of Marrala, the Emu Man, a creator spirit, whose footprints appear and disappear under shifting sands along more than 50km of coastline.

They are written into songlines that tell the dreamtime history and law of the area, which is so heavily pockmarked with fossilised footprints that it’s become known as the dinosaur coast.

Paleontologist Dr Steven Salisbury, a senior lecturer with the school of biological sciences at the University of Queensland who leads a project to map out the dinosaur footprints on the Dampier Peninsula, said these particular tracks belonged to a carnivorous theropod, bigger than a velociraptor but smaller than a Tyrannosaurus rex.

By the size of the footprints, he said, it was estimated to stand between 1.5m and 1.8m high at the hip, which, “assuming it’s a bog-standard carnivore” would make it between 3m and 4m long.

“They are unique to the Dampier Peninsula,” he said. “That sort of track only occurs here.”

The three-toed footprints are less plentiful than sauropod tracks but more recognisable, looking like every dinosaur track ever found in a cartoon.

Sauropod tracks, which belong to four-legged herbivores, “can just look like little potholes”, Salisbury said.

Salisbury said the rocks in the Dampier Peninsula were rich with footprints of sauropods, theropods, stegosaurus and other cretaceous-era dinosaurs. It’s the only area in Australia where dinosaurs of this era are recorded.

He said the density of tracks was based on a combination of the environment that existed in that area 130 million years ago that attracted the dinosaurs and the particular rock which preserved the footprints.

“It seems like the area was part of a vast river plane flowing into a delta so there were lots of species that were conducive to the preservation of dinosaur tracks,” he said.

Prints of the three-toed carnivore can be found at a number of points along the coast, most notably at Minyirr, also known as Gantheaume Point, where they are exposed in the rocks. Minyirr is also a significant place in the Marrala dreaming.

“The whole community is littered with these tracks, local Bart Pigram told Guardian Australia. “They come up every now and then and then they disappear and no one talks about them for 20 years until they pop up again.”

Pigram is a Yawuru man, one of the groups recognised as traditional owners of the area, and is also a member of the Dinosaur Coast Management Group.

He said he was concerned about the ability of Indigenous people to protect these particular tracks because Cable beach is the centre of the town’s tourist area.

“We have had issues before when people have come up and actually tried to gouge the rocks out,” he said. “This is prehistory, it must be protected.” </s> The photo above shows the partially excavated fossil skeleton of a newly discovered species of diplodocoid dinosaur in the Lingwu region of China. Dubbed Lingwulong shenqi (the Lingwu amazing dragon), the fossils are around 174 million years old.

The finds provide evidence that diplodocoid dinosaurs were distributed across the supercontinent Pangaea, according to a paper published in Nature Communications.

Sauropods were long-necked, herbivorous dinosaurs and among the longest and largest land animals to have lived. It has been thought that advanced sauropods, the neosauropods, diversified during the breakup of Pangaea and had not reached East Asia before it became isolated.

Evolutionary and biogeographic analyses including the new species now suggest that neosauropods were already diverse and widespread in the Middle Jurassic (about 174 to 163 million years ago), rather than rapidly becoming dominant at the transition to the Late Jurassic (163 to 145 million years ago) as previously thought. Furthermore, major sauropod groups may have originated in the Early Jurassic. </s> The dinosaur, which roamed the Earth some 174 million years ago, has been named Lingwulong shenqi. According to the study, "Lingwu" is for the name of the region in which the fossils were discovered; "long" is Mandarin Chinese for dragon; and "shenqi" Mandarin for amazing. All together, the new dino is the "amazing dragon of Lingwu."

Although sauropods have been found globally, researchers noted that due to the fragmentation of the ancient continent Pangea, several subgroups of the species had been restricted to certain parts of the world. This had been the case for the subgroup neosauropods, to which the latest find belongs.

Paleontologists involved in the study first began to excavate four sites across northwest China in 2005, which ultimately resulted in the discovery of seven to 10 partial skeletons of the new species, ranging from juveniles to adults. Officials also noted in the study that the fossils were older than any other similar dinosaur remains by 15 million years.

Considering it's difficult to paint an exact picture of how the dinosaur might've appeared — or behaved, for that matter — officials have estimated that the new dinosaur varied anywhere from 35 to 55 feet long from head to tail and moved fairly slowly.

"Not only is it the oldest member [of this group], but it's the first ever from Asia," study author Philip Mannion told the BBC. "For a long time it was thought that neosauropods didn't get into Asia during the Jurassic."

"This suggests that firstly, [neosauropods] got in before any kind of barrier came up, but increasingly the geological evidence suggests maybe this barrier was quite ephemeral," he added.

Moving forward, researchers hope to find even more fossils to support their work.
A beachgoer in Australia discovers dinosaur footprints believed to be around 130 million years old while combing the shore for shells.