Update, 12 April 2013 Woodside Petroleum has to develop the gas plant at James Price Point.
IF YOU stand on the clifftop at James Price Point in Western Australia and look out over the rocky foreshore, you will see a landscape that has been practically undisturbed since the early Cretaceous. The sandstone is pockmarked by oval pools 1.5 metres long – the fossilised footprints of herds of giant dinosaurs.
The 130-million-year-old footprints are dotted down 200 kilometres of shoreline on the . But palaeontologists say the small section found at James Price Point is particularly significant, and are dismayed that this is precisely where one of the world’s largest plants for liquefied natural gas is to be built.
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Last month, Western Australia’s (EPA) recommended that the state’s environment minister approve a project to build a 25-square-kilometre facility on James Price Point to liquefy and export gas from the offshore Browse basin (see map).
As part of this, Australian oil and gas company , and partners , , and , intend to build a large industrial port over approximately 2 kilometres of intertidal zone, smack in the middle of the Cretaceous landscape, which includes fossilised plants as well as tracks left by vast herds of sauropods and other dinosaurs.
The handful of palaeontologists who have studied the site say the project will compromise a unique opportunity to study what life was like for dinosaurs. Woodside Petroleum argues that the gas plant would restrict scientists and the public from accessing less than 1 per cent of the coast and claims it can avoid known tracks, but the researchers say that is not good enough.
Thousands of dinosaur footprints have been discovered along the peninsula since the 1990s. The collection, preserved in sandstone, appears to come from 12 or more different species – much more than the two or three typically seen at other sites. “All major groups of dinosaurs appear to be represented,” says at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. That includes sauropods – the largest known dinosaurs – which have left prints up to 1.75 metres long.
“All major groups of dinosaurs appear to be represented. The diversity is unparalleled”
The diversity of the prints at James Price Point is thought to be unparalleled. “The original land surface over which the dinosaurs walked is preserved virtually intact – much better and over a bigger area than at other sites along the coast,” says Salisbury.
Moreover, some of the prints seem to have been made by an as-yet-unknown species, according to Tony Thulborn, a retired palaeontologist from the University of Queensland.
The way the tracks interconnect makes the site unique, says Thulborn, who has studied the area for over two decades. He reckons a closer investigation of the overlapping tracks might shed some light on the social behaviour of dinosaurs. Salisbury agrees: “From the heavily trampled areas we can start to get an idea of the herd structure of sauropods.” Both researchers warn that building a gas plant in the middle of a series of tracks – even over a small portion of the area – could seriously hamper this.
Further study of the coast should also help answer questions about how dinosaurs changed their environment, says John Long of the . “Elephants today can turn a forest to grassland,” Long says. “Maybe dinosaurs were also major drivers of environmental change.” Indeed, Thulborn’s research suggests the dinosaurs moulded the modern landscape (PLoS One, ).
The footprints are not the only important relics here. The coast also has fossilised flora and preserved soils from the same era. “There are numerous plant stumps and roots – not only of large trees but even small herbs,” says at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. He hopes they will reveal the conditions the footprints’ owners were living in, and what they were eating. For instance, the position of tree stumps and detritus indicates the dinosaurs were walking through a forest, says Ralph Molnar a palaeontologist at the in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The EPA’s recommendation depends on the oil and gas companies’ promise to steer clear of known footprints. In late July, the organisation said Woodside Petroleum would have to avoid a 900-metre stretch of shore that contains many prints, restricting plans for the port. But that does not take into account undetected fossils, of which there could be many, says Thulborn.
All the identified prints are in a rocky tidal zone. Low tides can uncover hundreds of metres of rock, but then researchers have just hours – or sometimes minutes – to study them. “For the worst ones, you have to wade in until you’re neck-deep at low tide, and then you’ve got 10 or 15 minutes before the tide comes back in,” says Thulborn.
Salisbury points out that the coastline changes with the tides. From one year to the next, sandy beaches can transform to expose the rock beneath, and potentially new footprints, tracks and fossils. Without knowing what is under the sand, conservation is impossible, says Salisbury.
While Woodside Petroleum promises to develop a management plan to avoid harming tracks identified in the construction process, it is unlikely to overcome these difficulties and identify all the hidden fossils, say Salisbury and Thulborn.
“The gas company plans to avoid harming tracks but it is unlikely to identify all the hidden fossils”
Footprints could also be unintentionally harmed, says Thulborn. This fate befell the Lark Quarry site in Queensland, which holds the only evidence of a dinosaur stampede, after . “It exposed the rock underneath and [the prints] have been deteriorating since,” he says.
Although Thulborn and Salisbury are very clear that the dinosaur prints must be conserved in situ, others believe there are different ways of preserving the information they hold. Long points out that the coastline is continuously eroded by crashing waves and seasonal monsoons. In some cases, the erosion can be rapid: Thulborn saw the top layer of one print disappear overnight after a single heavy storm.
Footprints can be studied from casts and laser scans that preserve most of the scientific data long after the rock is eroded, says Long. Casts preserve individual tracks in detail, while laser scans can record three-dimensional profiles of whole trackways, showing the paths of several animals or groups travelling together. Software can analyse the data to follow an individual animal and measure its stride and gait.
However, Salisbury believes the tides and rapidly changing nature of the landscape at James Price Point makes the use of such techniques difficult.
The area is also important to Aboriginal Australians, who regard the prints as sacred. The Jabirr Jabirr and Goolarabooloo peoples attribute the prints to an ancient “emu-man” who walked out of the sea and then returned, leaving feathers wherever he sat in the mud. “The indigenous value is beyond question, and work has only proceeded with the assistance and cooperation of indigenous communities,” says Long.
Why not move the processing plant? says that economic constraints require the site to be within 500 km of the Browse gas basin.
For Thulborn and Salisbury, that’s not sufficient. “This is one of the only places in the world where we can look at the potential distribution of different types of dinosaurs across a big geographic expanse,” Salisbury says. “Before we’ve even had a chance to work any of this stuff out, we’re facing the possibility of losing it.”
Stolen footprints
If stealing a dinosaur print sounds impossible, think again. When researchers started studying the unique prints along the Dampier peninsula in Western Australia, they took few precautions to keep their location secret. In October 1996, a rare print – thought at the time to be the only evidence of stegosaurs on the Australian continent – went missing, never to be recovered.
Thieves used a rock saw to remove the print in its surrounding rock. Henk Godthelp, an Australian palaeontologist who advised the government on how to recover the prints, says they were probably destroyed before the thieves got them out of the ground.
Around the same time, theropod tracks were stolen from another location. As a result, the exact locations of dinosaur prints, especially the smaller ones, are now kept secret. In the map (above right), we have only identified the general location of certain tracks, as indicated in public documents.
