Photo: Damian Kelly /89hHSWidc4- Steve Salisbury March 27, 2017 Our monograph on the dinosaurian tracks of Walmadany is now out as the 2016 SVP Memoir. If the prints that their folklore was based on were valuable to paleontologists, then maybe the land would be protected. The Goolarabooloo wanted to protect their lands and they knew they might have a bargaining chip up their sleeves. That is, until 2008 when the Australian government wanted to build a gas processing plant in the Walmadany area, where most of the dino prints are located. So they’ve known for thousands of years that these footprints existed, they just weren’t about to open up their homelands to a bunch of outsiders. These so-called ‘song cycles’ detail the paths that their supernatural predecessors took, as demarcated by the enormous tracks they left behind. The men tasked with maintaining the laws and rituals for the Goolarabooloo people have passed down lyrical stories about the footprints. To the indigenous tribe, those tracks were left by ancient, spiritual beings who walked those lands during the Creation Time. The Goolarabooloo people have been singing about dinosaur footprints for thousands of years-they just don’t call them ‘dinosaurs.’
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