Doubt cast over dinosaur stampede theory

Scientists are now trying to determine what type of dinosaur left footprints at Lark Quarry about 95 million years ago.

For 30 years, scientists have believed the footprints at Lark Quarry were made by a large carnivorous dinosaur chasing down smaller reptiles.

However, University of Queensland researchers Anthony Romilio and Steve Salisbury have released a scientific paper and Dr Salisbury says it is an exciting finding.

"With the realisation that this is probably a big plant eater, we now really have to question the whole stampede scenario," he said.

"Would a big, plodding plant eater like muttaburrasaurus cause a herd of small dinosaurs into a stampede - it is exciting stuff."

He says the research has been peer-reviewed before being published.

"Just looking at the big tracks and the amount of comparison that we've done ... I think we're fairly confident that we've come up with a fairly reasonable hypothesis for what occurred there," he said.

"It looks like it was a big plant eater and so that kind of changes things a little bit in terms of what is happening out at Winton with regard to the dinosaur story."

'Grey area'

But Winton dinosaur expert David Elliott, from the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, has been involved in a project at Lark Quarry with the Queensland Museum and he believes the carnivorous dinosaur theory holds.

"Our research is drawing a vastly different conclusion to that reached by Mr Romilio and Dr Salisbury," he said.

Mr Elliott says their results are due out shortly.

"The Lark quarry 'trackways' is always going to be controversial because it is one of those grey areas of science," he said.

"We are looking on relevant new discoveries among well documented scientific data," he said.

"We definitely do believe that that is the case [that it is a meat eater] and the evidence that has always historically pointed to that has been gathered and studied by some very, very capable palaeontologists over the past 35 years.

"We can't and we shouldn't just simply discard their work on the strength of the opinion of the first work to the contrary."

Source from :http://www.abc.net.au



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