A Dragon on the Farm
A prehistoric flying reptile that soared through the skies 96 million years ago is discovered by chance
‘Iron dragons’ once clashed in primeval skies over now peaceful farmland.
Weeding along Wardoo Creek was just one of grazier Bob Elliott’s many jobs on Belmont station, his vast, 18,000-hectare sheep and cattle property on the western Queensland plains, about 100 kilometres from the nearest town, Winton. One day in April 2017 he set off early – about 7am – to drive the 15 kilometres from his homestead to the creek. It wasn’t a particularly hot day for the time of year, only 36 degrees Celsius or so.
Bob’s task involved spraying burr with weed- killer while driving a quad bike along the dry creek bed, and pulling it out by hand in parts too narrow for vehicle access. Expecting a solid day’s work, he packed lunch as well as ‘smoko’ (morning tea). But drought meant far less burr than usual; by 11.30am he’d finished a job that normally took two or three days. So he decided to do what he
often did in spare moments – fossick for fossils.
Finding dinosaur bones is something of a family tradition at Belmont. Bob’s parents, David and Judy Elliott, found their first fossil here in 1999, and then founded the district’s Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum (AAOD). Bob and his brother Harry grew up on a sheep farm that doubled as a centre for palaeontological discovery, regularly hosting digs. Naturally Bob and Harry caught the dinosaur bug too, and often went fossil-hunting with their parents. The boys soon developed keen eyes for telling bone from stone.
That part of Wardoo Creek had always interested them, but the family had never found anything there. Its flat siltstone deposits bore prehistoric ripple marks from a shallow lake, or the long-gone inland sea bordering the area millions of years ago.
Figuring he might find a shell, or a scrap of bone, the 28-year-old grazier climbed out of the creek channel and looked for 20 minutes along a ridge. Looking back towards the creek, his eye caught a white piece of rock, about the size of an average knife-handle.
That’s no sheep bone, he thought. That’s fossil!
At first he took it for something from the Pleistocene (Ice Ages) epoch, but that didn’t sit right. It was heavier than any Pleistocene fossil he’d handled before. In fact, it was completely filled in with rock.
And it wasn’t a sauropod. Bones of those long-necked, elephant-dwarfing dinosaurs had turned up on Belmont several times over the years, including a find of his (nicknamed Judy after his mum) due to be excavated over the coming winter. This was clearly a smaller creature. Bob was getting very interested. What could it be?
Bob soon began spotting smaller pieces nearby. Before leaving, he noticed a larger piece about four metres away. Palm-sized, it bore a pointed oval tooth, about two centimetres long. A closer look revealed
PTEROSAURS – WINGED REPTILES
– RULED THE SKIES FOR 160 MILLION YEARS
two more teeth.
A piece of jaw, Bob realised instantly. After marking the site, he took the jaw home and looked up all he could online. The tooth’s shape had Bob assuming it was from a fish- eater, maybe a crocodile or plesiosaur (extinct long-necked marine reptile). But crocodile teeth are typically thicker, so he leaned towards a plesiosaur – a creature never found locally before.
A few days later he drove the jawbone to the AAOD where his dad worked, on a forested mesa just outside Winton. Together, Bob, David,
Harry and Judy excitedly examined the find. A little more research sank the plesiosaur theor y. The size of the jaw – “an inch wide, max,” Bob noted – seemed too small. Secondly, marine reptiles weren’t hollow-boned. After more discussion and research, David ventured a thrilling deduct ion. “It’s a pterosaur,” he said.
This had the whole family buzzing. Pterosaurs – winged reptiles – hardly ever turn up in Australia. None had ever appeared around Winton before. Only two Australian species from 15 individuals were known, from the merest fragments. Based on what Bob had seen, this one was already more complete than any of them.
Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight, millions of years before birds and bats. About 120 species have been found worldwide, ranging in size from sparrows to small planes. They ruled the skies for 160 million years in dinosaur days, but unlike dinosaurs – who are still with us, in a sense, as birds – pterosaurs have no living descendants. Their line has wholly vanished from the earth. Their fragile, hollow, flight-capable bones only survive as fossils almost by miracle.
This one, Bob realised, died in exactly the right place to be found. As David recalled, in 2000 floodwaters swept through the usually dry creek as high as where the pterosaur lay. Soil washed away, exposing the long-hidden bones. For 17 years they weathered on the surface, kicked, trodden on and scattered by livestock. A few years more and nothing may have remained. After 96 million years, Bob came along just in time.
Among AAOD staff thrilled by the discovery was Adele Pentland, 23 years old and partner to Bob’s brother Harry. A recent geosciences
graduate, she had been working as an AAOD tour guide for about a year. Her academic focus was prehistoric insects preserved in amber, but her career was about to fly in another direction. David offered her the job of scientifically describing the new find. Leaping at the opportunity, she took on a new PhD topic: pterosaur fossils from eastern Australia.
Adele’s first task was to comb the creek for any more bits and pieces. With only a year of lab and field experience at AAOD, she suddenly found herself helping to run a dig.
It was a steep learning curve. Some things just weren’t taught at university – such as finding the upper jaw tip broken up, yet fixed in place by grass tussock roots. Plagued by flies and the dry winter heat, a small team collected most of the pieces in two days, though five weeks were spent on site between May and August. Al l the dirt was saved and then painstakingly sifted through, a job taking several months.
AAOD lab technician Ali Calvey prepared the bones – removing attached stone – and Adele settled into the patient work of piecing fragments together. Her scientific description involved naming the new creature. Wanting something both scientifically suitable and easy for kids to say, Adele came up with Ferrodraco lentoni – Lenton’s Iron Dragon. ‘ Ferrodraco’ reflects the oft-noted resemblance of pterosaurs to winged dragons of folklore and heraldry, and the ironstone that filled this dragon’s hollow bones. The rest salutes Graham Lenton, Winton’s ex-mayor, a staunch supporter and friend of AAOD. His death just six months after Bob’s discovery made the tribute especially timely and popular locally. The fossil had already been given his nickname, ‘Butch’.
The results, published just over two years later in October 2019, caused a worldwide sensation. Adele was besieged with media and her scientific paper was one of the most read that year.
Ferrodraco’s remains, Adele determined, were 10 to 11 per cent complete. That might sound meagre, but it’s by far Australia’s most complete pterosaur, tripling the total of bones from all finds.
Ferrodraco had lain on its left side, which was better preserved. Most of the 30 bones are from the crested jaw, neck and wings (Bob’s first sighting was a wing bone). About 40 spikeshaped teeth and isolated tooth fragments completed the picture of an apex predator in Cretaceous skies. The Cretaceous is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago.
Only a mid-size pterosaur, Ferrodra
co was still quite a monster, almost twice as big as most pelicans with a four-metre wingspan exceeding that of any living creature. It probably played an albatross’s role in the food chain.
Imagine a half-bat, half-crocodile creature, a flying fish-eater soaring on air currents above the southern shores of a long-vanished sea. Western Queensland wasn’t dry plains country back then; it was lush forest and swamp. And it was much further south, about where Victoria’s south coast is now situated – an effect of continental drift.
Were pterosaurs able to fly across oceans, like albatrosses? Scientific opinion is divided on the question, which is important as a key factor in their evolution. Ferrodraco adds intriguing evidence that maybe they could. Adele was surprised to find it more closely related to pterosaurs from England than South America. Yet when Ferrodraco lived, Australia was part of the Gondwana supercontinent, joined to South America, Antarctica and other land masses – but not England. Without transoceanic f light, Ferrodraco should be most closely related to other Gondwana pterosaurs it evolved in isolation with. But the Engl ish connection points to Ferrodraco, or at least an ancestor, being capable of long- distance overseas migration.
Now engaged to Harry, Adele is still investigating Ferrodraco’s place in the pterosaur family tree, and more surprises are sure to come. She’s put those other prehistoric fliers – insects in amber – on hold while her burgeoning palaeontology career soars on dragon wings. Fer
rodraco has now roosted permanently at AAOD, on display alongside local dinosaur discoveries. And Bob? He’s still out there on the family farm, taking care of business and – as always – keeping an expert eagle eye out for fossils.
IMAGINE A HALF-BAT, HALF-CROCODILE
CREATURE, A FLYING FISH-EATER