Editor's Note:

In response to a complaint from the WA Premier's Department, ABC Audience and Consumer Affairs have determined that although links to relevant Government documents are here on the Catalyst website, the report that went to air contained criticism of Government decisions relating to the precinct but did not provide sufficient context to enable viewers to understand the role or responsibilities of the Government in the protection of the dinosaur tracks.

The report should also have made clear that representatives of the Goolarabooloo Jabirr Jabirr native title claim group signed the

"Browse LNG Precinct Project Agreement" in June 2011.

NARRATION

In the far north of Western Australia, the Kimberley is a region where science has much to learn. The wildlife is abundant and diverse. The landscape is wild and unpolluted. And here on the Dampier Peninsula, north of Broome, things get really exciting. Only in recent years has its importance as a highway and nursery for humpback whales been recognised. But there's more.

Mark Horstman

What's unique about this coastline is that the largest animals on Earth today are swimming past the footprints of the largest animals ever to have walked the planet.

NARRATION

Written in this sandstone is a dinosaur story from deep time.

Dr Steve Salisbury

There's nowhere else in the world you can come and wander along these beautiful beaches, and come across some of the most important dinosaur tracks anywhere on the planet.

Louise Middleton

It's literally years of study that people need to be here, because we're finding new stuff every day, all over the place, different things. It's a wonderland.

NARRATION

Uniquely, the dinosaur tracks here are interwoven with Aboriginal songlines and creation stories.

Richard Hunter

Well, the footprints are like our ancestors, yeah? They were the first... the first living thing in this country.

NARRATION

But just as science begins to appreciate the full significance of the trackways, their security is threatened by a massive industrial development. For the time on television, in a Catalyst exclusive, you're about to see dinosaur fossils that have never been revealed before. They're found in rocky platforms along the pristine beaches north of Broome.

Mark Horstman

All this is the Broome Sandstone. It runs for 200km along this coastline, up to 280m thick. Where it's exposed between the low tide and the high tide, you find this incredible array of dinosaur footprints, wherever you look. Without seeing it with my own eyes, I would never have believed that this is possible.

NARRATION

130 million years ago it was much more crowded here.

Dr Steve Salisbury

This particular area, the Broome Sandstone, it's the only look we get at Australia's dinosaur fauna during this part of the early Cretaceous. We have no other sites in the continent of this age.

STEVE SALISBURY

Maybe something there, and then it becomes a lot clearer.

NARRATION

Palaeontologist Steve Salisbury is exploring an extinct ecosystem as we walk through a landscape frozen in time.

Dr Steve Salisbury

Most of the track sites that we see probably only represent, you know, between a few days and a couple of weeks, 130 million years ago, so they really do provide a fantastic snapshot.

NARRATION

At the time this was a vast river plain of muddy swamps and sandbars. Trampling through here were enormous herbivores known as 'sauropods', similar to Brachiosaurus or Diplodocus.

Mark Horstman

There are very few places in the world - and nowhere else in Australia - where I can sit in the footstep of a giant dinosaur. This is one of them, and so is that and that and that and that.

Dr Steve Salisbury

Here, what we get with the tracks is direct evidence of where the dinosaurs were, how many of them there were, and what they were doing, and that's stuff that we often can't get from fossil bones.

NARRATION

So far, Steve and his team have recorded the track types of more than 16 different dinosaurs. The most abundant animals in the track sites are sauropods. They shared these habitats with a diverse number of ornithopods, along with various thyreophorans or armoured dinosaurs. Least common are the carnivorous theropods. The palaeontologists rely on the local knowledge of Louise Middleton. She's explored the tracks with the Aboriginal community for nearly 30 years.

Louise Middleton

Finding Steve and working with the Queensland University has been fantastic for us, and also the fact that the Goolarabooloo people have trusted Steve to undertake this work and to hold certain knowledge that's really not shared with uninitiated men usually.

Dr Steve Salisbury

See, I reckon that's a trackway, just that one, and this is a second one.

Louise Middleton

Yeah, but this one's going in a different direction, mate.

NARRATION

For the past year they've been measuring the stride, pace and angle of the footprints to identify the animals that made them, even whether they were adults or juveniles. The grain of the sandstone is examined in fine detail to work out the habitat it came from. The locations of thousands of tracks are logged and photographed, some as stereo images to make three-dimensional animations. Real 3-D models are made too, using silicone casts. This one is a 10m-long carnivorous theropod, the only track of its type on this coast and perhaps Australia.

Dr Steve Salisbury

Silicone that we can use now sets really quickly - I mean we couldn't have done this ten years ago - and it's ideal for this sort of setting where we've gotta race against the tide.

Mark Horstman

Yeah.

Mark Horstman

You've gotta be quick to study the fossils here. This tide is racing. And this was dry a few minutes ago. The tidal range is up to 10m, and the fossils are only visible at the lowest of low tides, so that's for a few hours for a few days for a few months every year.

NARRATION

The tidal currents and storm surges constantly cover and uncover trackways with sand. Today Steve's team gets to see one for the first time.

Mark Horstman

Oh, yeah.

Dr Steve Salisbury

So, it's really nice. So this is one of the big ornithopod tracks. You can see three toe impressions and one toe pad there, central one here and then this is the second digit coming down into a big, fleshy heel pad. It's a big animal. That's, like... 8m to 9m long, even bigger. That's incredible. It's covered in big sauropod tracks and a number of different types of ornithopod tracks. There's some really clear trackways just over there of potentially a new type of dinosaur.

Dr Steve Salisbury

19.5

NARRATION

But their excitement is tempered by where we are - within the proposed footprint of one of the world's largest gas factories.

Dr Steve Salisbury

We'd probably be underneath the breakwater. I mean, the port is right there, so this would go, we would lose it.

NARRATION

The Woodside proposal involves piping gas from deep offshore wells to an onshore processing plant and export terminal, and dredging a port for LNG tankers right here on this stretch of coast.

Mark Horstman

Behind me is James Price Point, the proposed location for Woodside's gas hub, its refinery and its harbour. To give you some sense of the scale of the whole project, the breakwaters that they plan to build to protect the harbour to load the gas, extend 3km out to sea, way past where we are now.

NARRATION

It begs the question - where would the rock to build these massive seawalls come from? In a written statement to Catalyst, Woodside said their port construction would avoid the dinosaur footprints, but...

Woman

If footprints, or other fossiles, are discovered during construction, Woodside will identify how the footprints will be avoided, salvaged or scientifically documented.

Dr Steve Salisbury

I don't think we should be making the types of really important decisions about the future of this area that are currently being made by government and industry, and without really knowing what we've got. I mean, it's crazy.

NARRATION

Many agree, and attempts to start construction are being staunchly opposed.

Man

Woodside has no Section 18 to destroy this country.

NARRATION

Traditional owners standing in their own country are issued 'move on' notices by the police. For Goolarabooloo law boss Richard Hunter and his countrymen, the fight is about much more than fossils - it's about cultural survival.

Richard Hunter

You know, we have a songline... We're talking about culture - once they break the songline, well, then there's... We have nothing.

Louise Middleton

Breaking that songline, it's like someone going into the Vatican and smashing the chalices or vandalising the altar - that's the significance and the strength of these dinosaur footprints. They're the creation beings, and to interrupt or destroy that is spitting in your soul.

NARRATION

Every hour spent searching between the tides brings important discoveries, all in the area proposed for the gas development.

Dr Steve Salisbury

170?

Man

170, yeah.

(Both chuckle)

Man

It's gigantic.

Mark Horstman

What have you found?

Dr Steve Salisbury

Probably one of the biggest dinosaur tracks in the world. That enormous impression there is a handprint of a sauropod. Where there's a hand, nearby there's gotta be a foot, and look out...

Mark Horstman

Oh, hang on.

Dr Steve Salisbury

You're treading in it there. That huge big depression is a footprint.

Mark Horstman

That's incredible.

Dr Steve Salisbury

So, it's about...

NARRATION

Currently, the record size for a sauropod foot is 1.5m.

Dr Steve Salisbury

And that footprint's about 1.7m long, yeah, give or take a bit 'cause it's eroded. But this is an enormous animal.

NARRATION

An animal with feet the size of truck tyres would be 7m or 8m high at the hip and at least 35m long.

Dr Steve Salisbury

Think if there's a leg attached to this foot, going up. These were truly gigantic.

Mark Horstman

Yeah. Fantastic.

NARRATION

If tracks of the world's biggest sauropods are impressive then how about rock-solid evidence of an Australian stegosaur?

Dr Steve Salisbury

It's got four stubby little fingers on the hand and then quite a fat three-toed foot, and that combination is really characteristic of stegosaurs. We walk around these rocks now. It's a bit slippery and we go for slides and stuff. He has too. So, you can see here's his left foot, right foot, and then as he's come into this one with his left foot, he's gone for a bit of a... slip down there. It looks like there's a double step - he's kind of slid for a bit and then had to gain his grip, and got to the bottom there and probably quite relieved that he's made it... (Chuckles) ...and then continued up that way.

NARRATION

This find is of global importance. Without tracks like these, we would never know that stegosaurs once existed here.

Louise Middleton

When I found it I realised instantly the significance of it, and I just literally fell on my knees and cried, because I felt that if we can't save James Price Point with these tracks then we'll never save anything.

NARRATION

Steve believes the entire 200km of dinosaur coast is worthy of protection as World Heritage.

Dr Steve Salisbury

It should be conserved in its entirety. There's a whole scientific story that we're only just beginning to understand that requires knowledge of all the track sites together and linking all of them to try to understand the overall context of everything. I mean, you can do dinosaur ecology here.