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>Alt-rock legends Dinosaur Jr. will visit New Zealand for a one-off show.

The band, who have been shredding on and off since they formed in Massachusetts, USA, in 1984, will play The Studio in Auckland.

It's the first time the band has visited these shores since 2013, when they played to a sold out crowd at the Powerstation.

Since the original trio of J Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph reunited in 2007, Dinosaur Jr has produced four albums, taking their career total to 11.

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Their latest, Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not, has been called "as thrillingly noisy, focused and as concisely realised as anything in that vast back-catalogue" by Graham Reid of Elsewhere.

Dinosaur Jr. play The Studio in Auckland on January 23 2017. Tickets on sale from 9am, September 14 from Ticketmaster.co.nz and UnderTheRadar.co.nz.</s>Hatzegopteryx, the biggest flying animal in the world will be found, starting from today, at Dino Parc Rasnov. The giant flyer, who was discovered right in Romania, was reconstituted by Dino Parc Rasnov based on the discoveries made by Professor Dan Grigorescu from the University of Bucharest, the one who found the Hatzegopteryx fossils. The arrival of the pterosaur is accompanied by another premiere: a nest with 10 real dinosaur eggs discovered at Tustea, in the Hateg Country Dinosaur Geopark!

The new exhibition was inaugurated in the presence of the President of Brasov County Council, Adrian Vestea, of the Vice-Mayor of Rasnov, Liviu Butnariu, of the Mayor of Hateg, Marcel Goia as well as of the paleontologists from the University of Bucharest.

“Hatzegopteryx is the most important exhibit of Dino Parc Rasnov until now. We are glad that all our visitors will be able to see the full-scale reproduction of a unique discovery in the world, and that this discovery was made right in Hateg Country. Moreover, we’ve supported this year a team of students researchers who, under the guidance of the teachers from the University of Bucharest, have discovered two dinosaur egg nests close to Hateg. Our wish is to awaken the interest of both the specialists and the public who is willing to enter the mysteries of the dinosaurs’ lives. We also can say that we’ve reached 500,000 visitors, in one year after the park was opened, and we expect a growing number of children to come and see a little piece of history from a disappeared world which is slowly rediscovered”, stated Adrian Apostu, Manager at Dino Parc Rasnov.

“’The scaring flyer from Hateg’, as we named it, is from my point of view, a reason of national pride and a global premiere for a long time. Hatzegopteryx couldn’t find a better home than Dino Parc Rasnov, where he will stay together with the other dinosaurs that are accurately reproduced from a scientific point of view. I would like to thank to our partners from Dino Parc Rasnov for their support and direct involvement. This partnership gives me an additional hope regarding the area of paleontology in Romania”, stated Professor Dan Grigorescu.

Hatzegopteryx thambema (“The scaring flyer from Hateg”) was discovered IN 1978 by Professor Dan Grigorescu in the Hateg area. It lived about 68 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous. Its name is composed of the name of the region where it was discovered and “pteryx”, which is the Greek term for “wing”. Having an wingspan of about 12 meters, a skull of around 3 meters unprecedented in any animal in the past, with strong bones of the limbs, despite its capacity to fly, which involves easiness, Hatzegopteryx thambema is the biggest pterosaur discovered until today.

In the fossil site from Tustea were discovered 18 egg nests belonging to the dinosaur species of hadrosauroid (“dinosaur with duckbill”), Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus. Establishing the membership is given by the fact that there fragments of the chickens’ skeleton were discovered near the egg nests, and they are clearly indicating that they come from Telmatosaurus. It was and it still is a big surprise in the scientific world, because the type of spherical egg, having the shell decorated with rounded nodules and with a prismatic micro-structure, discovered at Tustea, belongs to the egg species called Megaloolithus; until the discovery from Tustea, this kind of egg was deemed to belong to some big sauropod dinosaurs, therefore to herbivore dinosaurs from the Titanosaur family. In Argentina were discovered even embryos of titanosaurs in eggs of this kind!
A beachgoer in Australia discovers dinosaur footprints believed to be around 130 million years old while combing the shore for shells.