The Dinosaur Stampede

Date of Adventure 14 November 2024

Getting here takes a little perseverance. It’s not really difficult just about 110 km from Winton, the nearest town. I’d camped in a National Park that’s a little closer but requires some gravel driving to get to. So I doubt if it saved me any time in travel. This is a really interesting tour just because of the nature of the site and how far it is out of town. In my case, I picked the 11:00 tour because I wasn’t sure how long it would take to drive and didn’t want to risk the 9:00 one. Well, there were only 3 of us in the tour, which is really nice!!

The drive: It’s about 110 kms from Winton and about half of the trip is sealed and the other half well graded gravel. It’s easy to make it in virtually any car just a little slower on the gravel part. Some corrugations but nothing to worry about.

I’m going to make this a fairly quick write and show the pictures. This is the kind of tour that doesn’t work well in a description. It was a really good 1 ½ hour tour and the footprints are well worth the drive to get here.

This is a pretty large area of dinosaur tracks that have been fossilized. According to the story, it was first discovered in the 1960’s. It took many years for the site to become known to paleontologists and then to get uncovered and made into a museum. There were a number of small but not inconsequential mistakes before they built up the building that now encloses the entire area that’s been “excavated”.

It’s a pretty simple building that covers something over 50 meters of the stampede footprints. The tour is a combination of a few short videos followed by about 45 minutes inside the main room where the tour guide explains the footprints and tells the story. The majority of the footprints are from some pretty small meat eating dinosaurs. There are a few prints from larger dinosaurs and one set from a pretty big one. The guess is that the big one was a dinosaur very similar to “Banjo”, the important carnivorous dinosaur at the Age of Dinosaurs Museum.

The first picture below shows the prints and direction of travel of the large carnivore. There’s lots of speculation about whether this was the reason the smaller ones took off running or whether it was some other event that spooked them.

I’m not going to say much about this whole display except to note that these footprints are pretty clear. If you want to see more, well you’re just going to have to make the drive from Winton. It’s well worth it. It’s a little hard for me to tell the story. It’s one of those things that you have to see for yourself to truly appreciate it.

That’s it!! After this I was off to camp in the opal fields near Opalton. Hotter than hell but a good place for me to camp and spend some time.