The tracks belong to the Winton Formation, sandstone laid down roughly 95 million years ago, when central-western Queensland was not desert but a low, green floodplain laced with rivers, swamps, and forest. Two distinct sizes of small footprint dominate the slab, made by chicken-sized and emu-sized two-legged dinosaurs. Cutting across them runs a set of much larger three-toed prints, around 50 centimetres long, left by something the size of a modern car. Whatever made those big tracks, and whatever the small animals were doing, the encounter was sealed almost at once: the water rose, sandy sediment slid over the prints before the mud could crack, and successive floods buried the whole surface deep enough to turn it to rock.

The original interpretation, built in the 1970s, cast the big trackmaker as a predatory theropod that triggered the panic. Later research complicated nearly every part of that story. In the 1990s, reanalysis suggested the large prints might belong not to a meat-eater but to a big plant-eating dinosaur, something more like Muttaburrasaurus. More recently, Dr Anthony Romilio of the University of Queensland and colleagues argued from the sediments that the surface formed in a seasonal watercourse over perhaps several days, not a single frantic minute, with animals simply crossing the channel. Other studies, using a reconstructed foot of the carnivore Australovenator, concluded the large tracks could still be theropod after all. The honest answer today is that the stampede is contested, and the case is not closed.

However it formed, getting to it was its own epic. A station manager named Glen Seymour first noticed dinosaur footprints in the area in the 1960s. In 1976 and 1977, palaeontologists from the Queensland Museum and the University of Queensland, among them Mary Wade and Tony Thulborn, excavated the main site, shifting more than 60 tonnes of overburden by hand to expose the track layer. The quarry took its name from Malcolm Lark, a volunteer who cleared much of that rock. They uncovered roughly 200 square metres of prints; a 2025 digital re-survey by Romilio put the figure at least 3,436 footprints across 210 square metres, a density of more than 16 prints per square metre, an extraordinary concentration even if not Australia's densest.

Footprints that survived 95 million years underground proved alarmingly fragile once exposed to Queensland weather. An early shelter slowed the damage but did not stop it, so in 2002 a purpose-built Conservation Building was raised over the trackways, stabilising temperature and humidity and keeping rain, people, and wildlife off the rock. The site joined the Australian National Heritage List in 2004 for its rarity and research value, and guided tours, now run with the Australian Age of Dinosaurs museum, draw visitors more than a hundred kilometres south-west of Winton each year. A popular claim links the tracks to the Gallimimus stampede in Jurassic Park, though a consultant on the film has denied any connection, one more legend layered over a place that keeps refusing to settle into a single tidy story.