This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

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.

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“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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Goolarabooloo elder Phillip Roe stands in front of a dinosaur footprint near James Price Point, north of Broome, Western Australia. Photograph: Janine Israel/The Guardian

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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tourists ride camels along Cable beach in Broome, where three-toed dinosaur tracks were found on Sunday. Photograph: Janine Israel/The Guardian

“It seems like the area was part of a vast river plain 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.

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“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.”