Australian Age of Dinosaurs

Date of Adventure 13 November 2024

As I was planning travel I came across the fact that I would be travelling through or close to a part of Queensland that is known for dinosaur fossils. So I routed things to try to see some of it. I’ll have to figure out how to put marked up maps on here at some point. Maybe just mark up some of my Hema Maps and photograph them. First stop was Hughenden and it’s not too interesting. Then down to Winton. This is where there are two “museums” that I decided to visit. This blog is about the first: The Australian Age of Dinosaurs”. This is a museum, about 25 km out of Winton on the top of a mesa. They refer to these mesas as “jump-ups”. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any photos of the buildings from the outside. It’s a very impressive set up. And I was really amazed that Australia had almost no organized dinosaur fossil activity until the late 1980’s. The story behind this area is that a “rancher” named Elliot thought he found a bone on his property and called the Queensland museum to investigate. Their first foray was not very successful but he was convinced that there was more to be found. Part of his rationale has to do with the “black soil” around here. It’s really pretty black. This soil is self turning. With changes of seasons and rain and dry times it churns over and he was convinced that this process had brought the bone to the surface and there would be more bones deeper in the soil. So he did a little digging and found more. In the end, they’ve found lots of fossils in the general area. Apparently Elliot has give a bunch of money and land to the museum. It’s just an interesting story about how one person’s find and interest can make a change.

On to the museum and tour. I managed to get out there in time for the 9:00 tour. There were a total of 8 adults and one little kid on our tour. It cost me 100 AUD for this tour and the tour of the Dinosaur Stampede, which I’ll write about later. It’s a really beautifully done museum. The tour is kind of slick, but I learned a lot. It’s a 3 part tour. The first is a walk through a bunch of exhibits with a lot of very impressive bronze statues of dinosaurs, set up to show how things might have been. It includes some dinosaur footprints that I’ll write about when I get to the photos. The second part of the tour is a tour of their working restoration laboratory. It’s truly fascinating. And the last part is an indoor demonstration with a couple of very well done videos about the facility and how a lot of it came about.

The first real part of the tour is a reproduction of what a dig site would look like with bones scattered in a kind of random way. Partially because right after death various scavengers would have pulled the carcass apart and also because over time the bones will have moved due to environmental factors.

Then we went along through various different types of dinosaurs. The bronze statues are meant to be the real size of the original animals.

Flying “dinosaurs”. These are not dinosaurs but they are related. The ones that they represented were kind of small, not the huge flying beasts of the movies.

A couple of hard skinned dinosaurs.

And they had a sort of dramatization of the Dinosaur Stampede. I’ll say a bit more about the Stampede in the next post

I didn’t really get any good pictures of the buildings but here’s a little bit at the reception area. The buildings are really well done and very attractive.

The next part of the tour is a set of fossilized dinosaur footprints. These are in a fairly large building to protect them. The story behind these is really impressive. They were found about 80 km away from the site of the museum. So they were basically dug up and relocated at the present site. This is something like 54 meters of rock that was disassembled, piece by piece, loaded on small trucks, and brought to the museum. It took about 3 years to make the move.

I had a hard time making out the footprints and understanding the whole story behind them. But I’m sure that they tell the paleontologists a lot about how the dinosaurs lived and moved about.

Outside, in the courtyard there are more bronze statues of dinosaurs from the region. Some of these are huge and it’s pretty impressive; the lengths that have been taken to give us a sense of the sizes and general nature of these dinosaurs.

You can see some of the tour group taking pictures up close.

This museum is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, 25 km out of Winton. And Winton is kind of in the middle of nowhere itself.

They are working to start to grow various plants that will imitate the vegetation of the area during the time of the dinosaurs. Just the idea that they can do that is pretty inspiring. This area is now an arid and very hot part of Australia. Admittedly it was early summer when I was there but the temperature was running about 35 to 37 C.

While touring around there were these huge birds flying. A couple of birders in the group and our tour guide said that they are black kites. It was impressive on it’s own.

I think that’s enough for this blog posting. I’ll do another one about their laboratory and the final closeout. The lab really impressed me!!