5 of Australia’s amazing dino destinations FOSSILS IN AMBER
Our ancient land is a treasure trove of dinosaur finds and footprints, often of unique species that were then living at the far edge of East Gondwana. Here are five ways you can sample Australia’s dino delights.
‘Dinosaur Coast’ covered with footprints WHERE: BROOME, WA; longheld Indigenous knowledge > 1980s
It’s a one-way trip on the Broome Explorer Bus to Gantheaume Point, then a hike over the top and a scramble down its north side before you walk back along Cable Beach to the bus-stop for town. From the Point on, you can easily find dinosaur tracks which are considered among the most significant in the world. And they’re not only at Gantheaume Point: there are track ways stretching for some 80km along the Dampier Peninsula, and researchers from University of Queensland have identified numerous sites and literally thousands of dinosaur tracks of various sizes. There are potentially more than 20 different types of tracks, including theropods, sauropods, and long-necked four-legged herbivores. The web-based ‘Dinosaur Coast Track Guide’ can tell you more.
Dinosaur delights in a controlled environment
PLACES OF DISCOVERY:
Canberra, Sydney, Winton
If you’re not able to head for one of Australia’s original fossil-find sites, there are museums and experience centres which can still give you access to the magic of real dinosaur remains. Canberra has the National Dinosaur Museum, which includes a landscaped dinosaur garden of life-like fibreglass models as well as the skulls, skeletons, interactive replicas and animatronic dinosaurs of the indoor display. Sydney’s dino destination is the Australian Museum, with its real dinosaur skeletons and life-size models, fossil teeth, skulls and claws, as well as the world’s first anatomically-correct model of a T. rex – a dissected 11-metre long replica created for the documentary T-rex Autopsy. Of course Winton (above right) also has its dinosaur museum, while many other state and town museums hold and display significant local finds.
Home to Australia’s first-ever dinosaur find PLACE OF DISCOVERY:
Bass Coast, VIC, 1901
Bunurong Marine and Coastal Park in Victoria is home to the State’s most productive dinosaur fossil site, and it was where Australia’s first-ever dinosaur bone, known as the Cape Paterson Claw, was found back in 1901. More than 15,000 bones, teeth and fossils of small dinosaurs have since been found at The Caves beach just outside of the hamlet of Inverloch, where the ‘Flat Rocks’ on the shoreline are a favourite hunting ground when explored with care at low tide; you can search for the Inverloch Dinosaur Footprint from the shore platform about 100 metres north of the stairs at The Caves. The Bunurong Environment Centre in Inverloch has a dinosaur display and holds Dinosaur Dig Tours, in addition to hosting a display of 6000+ shell specimens.
Dinosaurs that decay and become ‘opalised’
PLACE OF DISCOVERY:
Lightning Ridge, NSW, 1965
Opals form within the cavities of rocks, usually a natural space, but occasionally a cavity where a shell or a bone was buried in soft sediments. In these cases the opal takes the form of that long-disappeared object: ‘opalisation’. Lightning Ridge is blessed with opalised fragments of sauropods, theropods, ornithopods and other dinosaurs. Opalised bones and teeth of one small running plant-eating dinosaur, hypsilophodont, were recently investigated by palaeontologists from Flinders University, using a micro-CT scanner to carefully isolate the amber from surrounding rock. Often such ‘fossils’ are colourless and valueless potch or common opal, but occasionally can be precious opal, including the prized Black Opal. The Australian Opal Centre in Lightning Ridge holds a magnificent collection.
From sheep to sauropods PLACE OF DISCOVERY:
Winton, QLD, 1999
During routine sheep mustering in 1999, David Elliott nearly drove over a giant bone on his property near Winton, in central-west Queensland. It turned out to be a giant femur from a Cretaceous-period sauropod 95 million years old – and that was just the beginning. Elliott returned regularly with his wife Judy and four children, collecting more bones, and in July 2001 a team from the Queensland Museum visited the site, and realised that this was the largest dinosaur yet found on Australian soil. A series of Winton discoveries over the next 20 years has revived Australia’s palaeontology field, and led to the creation of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History, in Winton. David Elliott, now OAM, was recently named Australia’s Local Hero for 2024.