Queensland’s Dinosaur Trail

Hitting up the Dinosaur Trail in Queensland was a BIG DEAL to Nick and I, because it was the one part of our trip last year that we really didn’t feel we did any justice at all. We were held up for about three extra days waiting for a radiator, and the three days that we decided to sacrifice in order to compensate were the days we’d planned to spend on the dinosaur trail.

This was our second try, and we were determined to make the most of it!

Despite having an amusement park kind of name, the Dinosaur Trail is just an area of Queensland where there are heaps of cool fossils and dig sites, museums and attractions related to dinosaurs, and the world’s only known fossilised dinosaur stampede. We bought our VIP passes ($75 per person) and were “roaring” to go!

Our first stop was the fossilised stampede at Lark Quarry, 110km southwest of Winton (and for those keeping track, about 65km west of Opalton, though still a 110km drive due to the way the road is laid out). About 95 million years ago, it’s believed that a herd of small and mid-sized plant-eating dinosaurs were gathered around a waterhole, when a large carnivorous dinosaur emerged from the surrounding forest and, as you’d expect, caused the smaller prey dinosaurs to scatter. All of the ensuing footprint chaos was preserved in the muddy banks of the waterhole and discovered in the 1960’s by a local landowner, who thankfully recognised its significance. It’s been wonderfully preserved and I can tell you, it is super duper cool to see actual dinosaur footprints.

(Although reading the Wikipedia article after the fact, it seems like there may be some doubt recently cast on this theory – still, it’s a good story isn’t it??)

From Lark Quarry it was off to the next location in our dinosaur tour, the Australian Age of Dinosaurs museum, 24km southeast of Winton, where I wish we’d done more selfies with this pretty realistic looking hungry dinosaur statue, after seeing how this one turned out!

The highlight for us from the Australian Age of Dinosaurs museum was the fossil lab tour. They are still finding heaps of dinosaur bones in this area of Queensland, meaning they still have several active digs a year, and the fossil lab is very active and work was even being done to clean up fossils while we were there!

You can also touch an actual dinosaur bone – that’s how common they are in this area I suppose?? It was a marvel for us – we are so used to dinosaur bones and fossils being behind glass in big museums, not being permitted to touch them, and thinking that one needed to be a paleontologist to have anything to do with dinosaurs.

In fact, they have a backlog of so many bones here (you can see one of them above is labelled from 2013) and not enough staff to prep them, that they hold 2 day intro classes to fossil prep, and then a 3 week course to teach casual citizens how to clean up the fossils – and then after you’ve taken the course, you’re welcome to come to the lab any time to prep fossils, supervised by the paleontologist on duty. They said their youngest volunteer technician is 11. Adults can also attend the digs and really get their hands dirty, too.

Also at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs (I know! So much cool stuff!), are the fossils of “Banjo” and “Matilda”, two dinosaurs discovered together. Banjo was a large carnivorous dinosaur and Matilda a large herbivore. The theory is that Matilda was stuck in the mud, Banjo attacked, Matilda managed to fend him off and kill him, and then died herself while still stuck and unable to escape the deep, sticky mud.

The Australian Age of Dinosaurs also has a self-guided walking tour with models of dinosaurs and a Cretaceous garden with ancient plants, which we thought was pretty neat.

Finally, it was off to Hughenden, about 200km northeast of Winton, to check out the Muttaburrasaurus skeleton. Muttaburrasaurus was discovered in 1963 in this area of Queensland, and at the time was the most complete dinosaur skeleton to be found in Australia.

And with that, we had well and truly ‘done’ the Dinosaur Trail, don’t you think??

Next stop – we’re heading north for more cool geological history – the lava tubes at Undara!

MVP: oh my gosh. FLY NETS. Guys. I’ll just leave you with these words from Bill Bryson’s book “In a Sunburned Country” about the friendly Australian fly. Everything he says is true…

“I had gone no more than a dozen feet when I was joined by a fly- smaller and blacker than a housefly. It buzzed around in front of my face and tried to settle on my upper lip. I swatted it away, but it returned at once, always to the same spot. A moment later it was joined by another that wished to go up my nose. It also would not go away. Within a minute or so I had perhaps twenty of these active spots all around my head and I was swiftly sinking into the state of abject wretchedness that come with a prolonged encounter with an Australian fly.

Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguishes itself with its very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging him. Flick at him as you will and each time he will jump out of range and come straight back. It is simply not possible to deter him. Somewhere on an exposed portion of your body is a spot, about the size of a shirt button, that the fly wants to lick and tickle and turn delirious circles upon. It isn’t simply their persistence, but the things they go for. An Australian fly will try to suck the moisture off your eyeball. He will, if not constantly turned back, go into parts of your ears that a Q-tip can only dream about. He will happily die for the glory of taking a tiny drop on your tongue. Get thirty or forty of them dancing around you in the same way and madness will shortly follow.

And so I proceeded into the park, lost inside my own little buzzing cloud of woe, waving at my head in an increasingly hopeless and desultory manner-it is called the bush salute-blowing constantly out of my mouth and nose, shaking my head in a kind of furious dementia, occasionally slapping myself with startling violence on the cheek or forehead. Eventually, as the flies knew all along, I gave up and they fell upon me as on a corpse.”

Luckily – we have these bad boys – picked up for $7.50 in Birdsville and worth every penny!

So, Where Exactly Is This?
Here’s a screenshot of this leg of the journey from WikiCamps! The red is what we’ve already covered, and the green is what was featured in the post you just read. You can also follow us live at this link – our satellite device pings our shared map frequently.