Winton is tiny – less than 1,000 people. Winton is in the middle of dry, flat, dusty,
drought ridden terrain. Everything seems
very expensive in Winton – food, fuel etc.
But we loved Winton. We loved the
feel and vibe of the place – Winton has been an absolute highlight of our trip.
Here be Dinosaurs!
Winton is the home of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs
Museum. Why you might ask is a museum
all the way out here – because here they find dinosaurs and lots of them. The land around Winton abounds in black soil
– not your usual stuff, this is special.
After the rains the soil sifts down into the layers of silt rock and
exposes dinosaurs. Yep the dino bones
can literally stick up out of the earth until someone runs into them. And that is exactly how all this started when
David Elliott ran over a large dinosaur bone riding a motorcycle in his paddock. He stopped to look and realised that the
mound wasn’t rock and fortunately didn’t leave sleeping bones lie.
The Museum of Queensland has mounted a number of digs and
identified a range of new dinosaurs that lived here when the land was cool, wet
and covered in rich vegetation. So many dinosaur bones have been found here
that eventually they built their own museum.
The Museum is an architecturally awarded building on a jump
up 16k from town. For those of you not
in the know (like us) a ‘jump up’ is a mesa, still in the dark, yeah we were
too. So lets try plateau. That worked for us anyway. The drive up to the museum is fantastic, as
is the view from the top. Why is the
museum located here – well the local community seems rather involved in this
dinosaur lark. The farmers find dinosaur
bones in their paddocks, managers find unique evidence of stampedes whilst
looking for opal, and others donate a mesa with a view for a super cool
museum. Yep Winton has a lot going for
it.
This museum is not like any you have been in. There are no galleries filled with musty
displays (ok they have some old bones here but they weren’t musty). The only way to see this museum is to take a
tour which has two parts – the prep area and the collection room. We started with the prep area.
One of the AAOD staff will provide you with a knowledgeable
and informative tour starting from how they find the bones, through to how they
are prepared. These guys have a lot of
bones, most wrapped in casts waiting to be prepped and identified. The best thing about the tour – you get to
touch a real 98 million year old dinosaur bone.
We aren’t talking a replica like the ones that populate museums far and
wide. This is the real deal, this is the
vertebrae of a very large sauropod that roamed the nearby lands when dinosaurs
ruled the earth. You can also lay your
hands on the fossilised plants it would likely have eaten.
Having finished this tour, the next part is the collection
room. Here they show you the bones they
have prepped and identified and the skeletons that are coming together from the
pieces they have found. The museum is
not government funded and taking the tours, buying the souvenirs, eating at
their café are all fund raisers for the work they do. Another fund raiser are their digs – anyone
can take part, but there is a fee. They
only do three weeks of digging a year, not because they wouldn’t want to do
more, but because they unearth so many bones in each dig they can’t process
them (in fact they have a 15 year backlog already). You do have to be 18 to join a dig and on
hearing about them both our boys have decided that they want a dig for their 18th
birthday present. Personally I can’t
think of anything I would like to give them more. By the way for a smaller fee for the training
you can also prep a dinosaur bone yourself – not an option for parents with
young kids however.
Dinosaurs on the run
Lark Quarry is located over 100k from town on a fair bit of
unsealed but very driveable road. There
is nothing at Lark Quarry, no shops, no café, not even a drink machine. But there is something so amazing it is worth
the drive – there is the only fossilised dinosaur stampede in the world!
You are about to step back in time to a very different world. Right here around 95 million years ago, a
large herd of small two legged dinosaurs gathered on the banks of a forest lake
to drink.
The herd was stalked by a large theropod – four tonnes of sharp-clawed,
toothy meat eating dinosaur. The herd
panicked, stampeding across the muddy flats.
A record of those few terrifying minutes is cast in more than 3300
fossilised footprints conserved in the Trackways building.
The trackyways building has been constructed (after less
expensive options had failed) to cover this amazing piece of prehistory. I will apologise for our piccies – we forgot
the camera bag, but thankfully I had brought my IPad. But it does lack a bit in picking up details
of fossil footprints in low light.
Again you can only enter with a guided tour (from another
very knowledgeable AAOD staff member and paleantologist) so our advice CHECK
THE TOUR TIMES BEFORE YOU DRIVE OVER 100K OUT THERE!!!!!!!
Once inside everything is eerily dark – footprints are
easier to see with shadows. You are then
talked through the whole stampede as spotlight illuminate the prints in the
story. Now I can imagine anyone reading
this might be thinking that we are somewhat crazy to have driven well a very
very long way for a bunch of imprints in a bit of mud. But I beg to differ. I (probably like many others) grew up reading
about dinosaurs, visiting the replica bones in museums, watching the docos, and
even the Jurassic Park movies. But here
in front of our eyes was a scene from 100 million years ago, actual truly real
dinosaur prints as they scattered and ran, even banging into each other as this
flesh eating monster came bearing down on them, causing them to run for their
lives.
These are the footprints of the theropod. You can even see that it changes direction
and heads off to the right. Did it find
its likely prey or was something bigger waiting for it over in the left hand
corner – that part you will have to fill in with your imagination.
By the way do you know how they know this is a carnivorous
beast – you can see in the print the large claw off the toe which they used to
rip into the flesh of their prey. Yep
these footprints are that good. The
other thing that is special about this fossilised stampede – it was amazing
that it fossilised at all. Firstly the mud had to be just right, not too wet
and slocky so that you get clear prints, not to dry so the prints don’t
actually get made. Then scientists
conjecture that shortly after the stampede, upstream a bank broke flooding
water and sand across the muddy plains.
Later a thin layer of iron oxide was deposited on the sand making its
way down and sitting on the mudstone with the prints. In doing this the footprints were preserved
by the sandstone but also separated from the sandstone enabling them to be
excavated as this entire scene. Chances
of another find like this – very very rare.
As I said Lark Quarry is a bit isolated – there is nothing
else to see here. But you can walk
around the reserve which of course we did.
A Rodeo in Isa leads us to a woolshed
What??? Well after Winton we had planned to go onto Mt Isa –
but there was a rodeo on. Apparently
it is the biggest, richest rodeo in the southern hemisphere, which meant that all the
accommodation was booked out. So we
stayed another day in Winton and went to the nearby Bladensberg National
Park. This used to be a sheep and cattle
station but after tough times on the land the lease was handed back to the
government.
There is a cool drive through the park to Scrammy’s
gorge and lookout which passes a now abandoned woolshed, the old homestead and
then crosses the dry plains before climbing up another of these jump ups (there
are a few of them around here). This was
a really interesting drive in such different country for us. The dryness of the
country was exacerbated by the prolonged drought, hardly a green leaf is to be
seen.
The creeks are dry and we only found the odd puddle of a
billabong servicing a vast countryside.
However, here in the home of Waltzing Matilda, this scrap of
water lead to our boys undertaking a spontaneous renactment without horses of
course.
 |
| Where's that jolly jumbuck you've got in your tuckerbag |
 |
| And his ghost maybe heard as you pass by that mud puddle. You'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me. |
However, our boys did come face to face with different sorts
of bones out here as the country was littered with the carcasses of kangaroos.
A lesson in the true impact of a drought for our boys.
We finished the day on a fantastic note with a visit to the
musical fence. Yep a bunch of correctly
strung wires and recycled metal objects made our kids day. They had a ball making ‘music’ for quite some
time and had to be torn away so we could finish the day with a meal at one of
the local historical pubs with the colours of the sunset imbuing the beer
garden as we ate. As I said at the start
– Winton is a fantastic outback town which we were glad we visited.
If you think you can’t really make music on this fence you
should check out Gotye’s encounter:
https://vimeo.com/19319418
A great read, thanks, Tracey. Great photos as well.
ReplyDeleteLove to the boys.
Nanna Chris