Wintonopus
Pronunciation
win-tonn-oh-pus
Meaning
Winton foot
Period
Cretaceous (145 - 66mya)
Ichnospecies in Australia
1) latomorum and 2) middletonae
Ichnospecies meaning
1) Stone Mason and 2) for Louise Middleton who has long been involved with the Broome discoveries.
Origin and other locations
Lark Quarry Qld (Thulborn, Wade 1984).
Australian use and location
Wintonopus latomorum is used at both Lark Quarry Qld (Thulborn and Wade 1984) and in the Broome region WA (Long 1990; Salisbury et al. 2016). Wintonopus middletonae only known from the Broome region (Salisbury 2016).
Description
There is a lot of variation in these tracks; nevertheless, they are typically defined as being wider than long, asymmetrical and blunt-toed. They are tracks of three-toed ornithopods.
The tracks of Wintonopus latomorum at Lark Quarry range from 3–25cm in length and represent dinosaurs 14–158cm tall. In the Broome region they are overall larger, ranging from 10.5cm-44.6cm long.
Only three tracks have been assigned to Wintonopus middletonae. These are about 19-25cm long.
It has been suggested that Wintonopus is a senior synonym of Skartopus, implying that all of the small track makers at Lark Quarry were ornithopods. However, this has been disproven (by Thulborn [2014]), and the two remain separate.