Australia's Oldest Dinosaur Fossil Came From Brisbane's Sandstone Quarry

In 1958, teenager Bruce Runnegar found a footprint at Petrie’s Quarry in Albion, Brisbane. A study published online in February 2026 identified the 230-million-year-old print as Australia’s oldest known dinosaur fossil. An ABC News feature on Nov. 15 revisited the find and its link to the sandstone that built Brisbane landmarks.¹⁴

The footprint is 18.5 centimeters long, and it went more than 60 years without a formal study. Runnegar, now an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland, kept it and showed it to students at the University of New England and at UCLA. It is now housed at the Queensland Museum.¹

“At the time, we suspected the marks might be dinosaur tracks, but we couldn’t have imagined their national significance,” Runnegar, a co-author of the study, said in the university’s announcement.¹

Why one footprint matters

The track dates to the earliest part of the Late Triassic. The research appeared online on Feb. 1, 2026, in the journal Alcheringa, and identified the fossil as Australia’s oldest dinosaur fossil. UQ paleontologist Anthony Romilio is quoted in the university’s announcement.¹³ The previous oldest dinosaur fossils known in Australia were footprints from Ipswich, about 215 million years old.²

According to UQ, it is also the only dinosaur fossil known from an Australian capital city. Urban development has since made the original site inaccessible, so this footprint is the only surviving dinosaur evidence from the area.¹ No dinosaur skeletal remains have yet been found in the Aspley Formation, so the track is the only direct evidence of dinosaurs at that time and place.⁵

“This is the only dinosaur fossil to be found in an Australia capital city and shows how globally significant discoveries can remain hidden in plain sight,” Romilio said in the UQ announcement.¹

Who left it

The researchers say the print was made by a small two-legged dinosaur, likely an early sauropodomorph. It stood about 75 to 80 centimeters tall at the hip. Small, in dinosaur terms, still meant roughly 140 kilograms.¹

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Romilio told ABC News that 230 million years ago the area was a very wide, shallow river with few trees, shared with salamander-like animals that lived in the water.⁴

“It may seem unusual in a capital city, that we find evidence of dinosaurs, but really all you need is the right aged material and a keen eye, and some conviction to investigate,” Romilio told ABC News.⁴

The stone that built Brisbane

Petrie’s Quarry was no obscure dig. The ABC reports that the Petrie family opened it in the 1860s. Its sandstone went into the General Post Office, All Hallows School, the Old Customs House, St Stephen’s Cathedral, St John’s Cathedral and St Paul’s Presbyterian Church.⁴² The footprint itself was collected at the quarry, not pried out of a building, but it comes from the same quarry that supplied those landmarks.

“If the Petrie’s hadn’t recognised the quality of that sandstone, we wouldn’t have the sandstone that literally built Brisbane,” educator Sue-Belinda Meehan told ABC News.⁴

The ABC also reports that two separate pieces of Brisbane-mined sandstone given to UQ’s Dinosaur Lab appear to show sauropodomorph tracks, and that both were found in the 1950s.⁴ The UQ announcement describes a single footprint: the 18.5-centimeter track Runnegar found as a teenager.¹

Romilio credits the people who held onto the stone. “Without the foresight to preserve this material, Brisbane’s dinosaur history would still be completely unknown,” he said in the UQ announcement.¹