The sandstone shelves of Roebuck Bay hold the world's most diverse assemblage of dinosaur tracks from a single geological formation.
More than 150 individual trackways — laid down 130 million years ago when this coastline was a river delta — emerge twice daily at low tide, preserved in rust-red stone beneath a few centimetres of water and silt. Sauropod prints the size of bathtubs sit beside three-toed theropod marks and the webbed impressions of early crocodilians. The site was catalogued formally in 1996 by paleontologist Tony Thulborn, though local Yawuru people had known the tracks for millennia, calling them marala — the footprints of the creation beings.
What makes the Broome dinosaur coast extraordinary is not just the age or number of prints, but their clarity. The fine-grained siltstone captured individual claw marks, skin texture, and the depth variation that reveals gait and speed. Some trackways show a herd of at least nine sauropods moving in parallel, likely a family group. Others record a confrontation: a large theropod's stride shortening as it closed on a smaller herbivore, both sets of prints overlapping in a frozen chase. These are not static fossils but behavioural records — snapshots of Cretaceous ecology written in mud and stone.
Access is controlled by tide and weather. The tracks lie on intertidal platforms only reachable by boat, and only visible when the spring low tide drops the water level below the shelf edge. Tour operators launch from Port Drive, navigating the mangrove-lined channels of Roebuck Bay before cutting engines and drifting onto the exposed stone. Passengers step directly onto the platforms, guided along marked paths to avoid damaging the adjacent matrix. The site has no built infrastructure — no boardwalks, no interpretive panels — because the platforms themselves are the heritage. Every dinosaur boat tour Broome operates under strict Yawuru custodianship, with visitor numbers capped and landing times staggered to prevent erosion.
The bay's tidal range — up to ten metres during spring tides — is what makes both preservation and access possible. Twice a day the platforms flood, the saltwater and silt acting as a protective seal. The same tidal flux that buried the tracks in 130 million years of sediment now regulates how and when they can be seen.
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