(05) Longreach to Winton
And so onto Winton for some old stuff. If you like really old hard stuff then this is the place for you. Dinosaur country! Based at Winton we headed off to the “Australian Age of Dinosaurs” for the grand tour. By far the thing that was most interesting was the Fossil Preparation Laboratory. Here they had dinosaur bones of all shapes and sizes (some huge) wrapped up in plaster and fibre, labelled with some dated back to 2013. Yes, they had a lot of work ahead, but with limited resources tried to focus on the more interesting finds as sometimes one find could take 6 months to chisel out. These finds are basically preserved in a layer of solid rock or an ironstone matrix which preserved them. At the time we were there they were working on a Titanosaus hippo bone and it was very personable being able to talk to one of the volunteer technicians about the various tools and processes they use to expose them.
Kind of technical stuff next so skip if I’m boring you. Very complicated but…
Most of the dinosaur finds in the Winton area have been made only recently (from 2000 onwards) in what is called the Eromanga Basin within the larger Australian Basin. This basin had sediments from the 210 to 90 million years ago with most finds in the late Jurassic Cretaceous period. Richmond has some of the older aquatic Kronosauraus and Winton the younger 95 million year old Titanosauraus and flesh eating Australovenator – this guy was real quick , 2m high, 6m long and about 1000 Kg with claws and teeth – NOT TO BE MET ON A DARK NIGHT OR ANYTIME.
As part of the Dinosaur Trail we drove about 100 kilometres on dirt road to the Lark Quarry Conservation Park to see the evidence of the only dinosaur stampede in the world
“The dinosaur trackways at Dinosaur Stampede National Monument were formed 95 million years ago when Outback Queensland was a vastly different place. A herd of at least 150 small two-legged dinosaurs, including carnivorous coelurosaurs about the size of chickens and slightly larger plant-eating ornithopods, came to drink at the edge of a lake. A terrifying encounter immortalised over the rock face… Over 3,300 footprints of these long-extinct dinosaurs are scattered over the rock face, stark evidence of the terror they must have experienced as they fled the scene upon the arrival of a large theropod. This snapshot of a few terrifying moments has been frozen in time, immortalising the event and making Winton home to the only known dinosaur stampede in the world. “
