One of the strangest fossil sites in the country has been sitting locked behind a door in central Queensland for more than a decade. The Fireclay Caverns at Mount Morgan — about a 40-minute drive south of Rockhampton — hold 195-million-year-old dinosaur footprints embedded in the cavern roof, the only example of its kind in Australia, the ABC reports. Now the town's tourism body has renewed its push to reopen them, releasing a feasibility study it hopes will turn Mount Morgan from a "daytrip stop" into a "stay and play" destination.
"The prints there … are of early Jurassic theropods," said John Steinberger, president of Mount Morgan Promotion and Development Inc, who led tours through the caves until a series of rock falls closed the site in 2011. "When you get to the door, you'll see 50 just sitting at you. You go around the corner, we've got another 100 odd … it's a labyrinth." Of roughly 10,000 reviews from his touring days, he says only one was negative: "It sells itself."
Footprints on the ceiling
The markings were a chance discovery in 1952, when miners excavated a hill that had once been a Jurassic lake. Palaeontologist Anthony Romilio of The University of Queensland, who has studied the tracks, explains the oddity: "You get these two fossilised layers. One's essentially an 'innie' and one's an 'outie'. At Mount Morgan in the Fireclay Caverns, you have these outies where you have not the footprint themselves, but the in-filled impression of that footprint." Reopening would be a gift to science as much as tourism, he says: "We've got new tools, new methods in order to evaluate and record these footprints since the site has closed in 2011. We can create 3D models and have virtual tours for people as well … complementing the actual onsite tours."
A town waiting on its 'hero' attraction
Mount Morgan has carried economic and social stress since its gold mine ceased operations in 1990 — though Heritage Minerals has been rehabilitating the mine and is scheduled to achieve its first gold pour later this year. The cavern entrance sits on the mine site but outside the mining lease, and untangling that is part of the job. "We've got to sort out tenure issues and financial issues to look at alternatives to accessing those Fireclay Caverns from the mine site," said Capricorn Enterprise CEO Mary Carroll, who notes the old tour company carried about 20,000 visitors a year before the closure, and who has spent more than a decade advocating for reopening. "That is the catalytic hero experience for Mount Morgan … and that is part of the story that is really missing."
Locals feel the absence daily. "It just seems ludicrous that we've got caverns sitting there with hundreds of dinosaur footprints in them … a major tourist attraction, and we can't access them," said Kerrilyn Page, who owns a cafe and newsagent in town. "It's one of the most frustrating things."
The site is part of a registered native title claim before the courts by the Gaangulu Nation People, though it legally sits under the state government's jurisdiction. The state's tourism department says it supports the feasibility study, and Rockhampton Regional Council has received a copy and is considering its response. For now, the theropods keep walking across the ceiling in the dark — as they have for 195 million years — waiting for the door to open again.