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.

Age of Dinosaurs #2

Date of Adventure 13 November 2024

Following up on the last post. At the Age of Dinosaurs Museum and tour we had 3 separate tours and the last post was just the first tour. The second and third one weren’t as photogenic but the tour of their restoration lab was the most interesting. I suppose most of us have some notion of the work that goes into digging up and restoring dinosaur bones or other fossils. This was a tour where we actually walked through the lab while a couple of people were doing the work. And, since it was a small group of tourists and a couple of us were very involved, their main restoration woman took time to talk to a few of us in detail about how things were done and to answer our questions. The tour guide was really good and it would have been a great tour even without the extra discussion.

They couldn’t take us to an actual dig but they have a demo of how it works with some of the tools used in the field.

When they get a bone exposed in the field they go to great lengths to stabilize it and wrap it, along with a lot of the surrounding matrix in a combination of cloth, newspaper, and plaster of Paris. They make a solution of some polymer (plastic to you non-scientists) in acetone and soak the bone with that in the field. After some time, the acetone evaporates, leaving the polymer in the bone to hold it all together.

These are real bones from three of the dinosaurs that they are working on. In all of the tours we were advised to stay a little back from the samples and not to touch. But we were allowed to touch these 3 bones. Honestly, they didn’t feel too special but it is something that you might not find in other tours.

There were several display cases containing different fossils, including some plant fossils. These two were interesting because of the information that they obtained from the few bones. The first is a pterosaur and they think it was fish eating from the nature of the teeth. But the second, Chookie, was different because they found fossilized food in the stomach. This data hasn’t yet been completely analyzed. (In Australia the word chook means chicken.)

Then we went into the working part of the lab. This is the actual sacrum from one of their specimens next to a cow sacrum. It really gave me a perspective on things!!

Then we just walked down through the working part of the lab. The woman at the back of the second picture is their main restoration person and she spent a lot of time talking to a few of us and explaining a lot of the details.

They were really good about showing how it’s all done. While we were walking through there was only one other person working. A woman was cleaning the rock away from a small bone with an air tool. Her work was broadcast on a video screen right there in the lab. So, here’s what she was doing.

Through the lab building there were all of these wrapped up bones waiting to be opened and cleaned. If you look closely at the picture you can see that this is a container with rib bones from 2015. They are pretty backlogged. I don’t know how many of these packages we saw but it was probably close to 50 in the whole facility.

Just a great tour if you want to know how it’s all done. And, it turns out you can volunteer to be a bone cleaner. I was told that it takes 10 days of training and it will cost you. They put you up in their local facilities and the price you pay to get trained is counted as a donation to the museum.

On to the last part of the tour.

This is a discussion and movie demonstration in their indoor theater. It was good, because it is air conditioned. I suspect that the temperature by the time we got to this point at close to noon was approaching 37 or 38.

They have a couple of really well done videos to explain the flora and fauna of the times of the dinosaurs. And a guide who explains some of the details, including a bunch of bones from some of their more famous dinosaurs. This is a really nice end to the tour. It was probably 45 minutes of video and discussion. Hard to say much about it but here are the bones that were laid out in the “theater” for us to look at. Don’t forget, these are the real bones, after stabilization and cleanup. Not like the replicas that you’ll see in most museums.

Next post will be a little shorter but it’s about my visit to the Dinosaur Stampede.