Financially Independent, Retired Early(ish) at 57.

Frogdancer’s Crazy Road Trip – Day 12: Dinosaurs and some big, exciting news.

The first thing I did when I left the motel was to find Arno’s Wall. It’s behind a pub and is simply a place where a guy called Arno kept putting random things in a wall he was making.

As you do…

He even put the kitchen sink into it!

In a nod to what Winton is really famous for, here is a public bin on top of a dinosaur foot.

A couple of years ago, I went on a Little Adventure to Narracoorte in South Australia, where I saw ancient fossils in the caves. Those were little ones.

Winton is famous for the huge fossilised animals they’ve found here. You know, the ones as big as the Jurassic Park Brontosauruses.

In fact, one of the ones I saw is the biggest animal to ever walk on land.

Honestly, the flies were a little annoying, but I wouldn’t have called them ‘extreme.’

The dinosaur museum is at the top of one of those long, flat mounds that jut out from the flat ground here. This one is about 75 metres high.

The Australian Age of Dinosaurs is very interesting. When I mentioned on Facebook that I was heading to Winton, my ex-sister-in-law Deb said that I mustn’t miss it.

She was correct.

They have a life-sized statue of a meat-eating dinosaur at the front door. They found his bones mixed in with a huge vegetarian dinosaur. Possibly, she was stuck in the mud by the inland sea and as he moved in for the kill, she managed to kill him first. When she died, they both were covered with water and then covered with silt, preserving their bones.

His bones are a lot lighter and smaller than hers. “We think that, if he wasn’t entangled with her, his bones would never have been preserved and we wouldn’t know of his existence,” said one of the guides.

As an aside, “his” and “hers” are guesses. There’s no way to tell the gender from the bones.

The incredible thing about the Winton dinosaurs is that they were found around 5 minutes ago.

In 1999, a local farmer called David Ellot was going about his business on his land when he noticed a massive femur sticking up from the ground. He was used to seeing cattle bones around the place, but this was something else.

Long story short – he knew that the layer of what’s called “Blacksoil” in the area has air pockets in it. He knew from what happened to his fences that it pushes up things that are buried within it.

It turns out that there’s a layer of dinosaur fossils back from when this place was a tropical inland sea. No one had any idea that they were there. And these dinosaurs are far larger than anyone had ever seen in Australia. It was a massively important find.

A few years later, David Elliot realised that unless he opened a museum of some sort, these fossils were probably going to be left to themselves. He opened this place and they have 2 digs a year. They don’t want to do any more than that because they’re harvesting more fossils in those two digs than they can hope to process in years.

There’s a bit of a backlog. Some of these fossils date back to 2011.

Someone asked the guide if there was anything new that they’d found recently.

“As it happens, yes there is”, she said. “We found something that we’re all very excited about, but before we can unveil it to the world it has to undergo peer reviews and testing. It took a full ten years for the news about Chooky to be released.”

Don’t worry. Chooky is coming…

Here I am, touching a 93 million-year-old fossil. As you can see, they ask that you be gentle with them. This comes from a Sauropod that was an adult and was around 18 metres/59 feet long.

Isn’t life wonderful?

Now here’s Chooky! He’s a smallish crocodile who was found to have the remnants of a dinosaur in his stomach. This is the first evidence anywhere in the world of crocodiles preying on dinosaurs.

This is a painting of how this place looked like back then. It’s funny. You see these flat fields and old trees and think that this is how this place would have always looked. Couldn’t be more wrong.

This is a fossilised branch from a tree. It was impossible to get the whole length in, but the tree it came from would have been over 100m tall. It would have towered over the whole hill we were standing on.

Here is one of the volunteers painstakingly scraping away the dirt and stuff from the surface of a fossil.

The next tour I went on was a mix of media and fossils. Here she is standing beside a replica of the meat-eater that I was running from outside.

Here’s how big the Sauropods were. These were 3m tall and had tiny little brains. They didn’t need much brain power – they were vegetarian and were surrounded by jungle vegetation.

Here is a sauropod’s femur next to that of a Brahmin bull.

They have so far found lots of the lower portions of animals. They think that, as happens nowadays with cattle, the elderly animals who are getting weaker walk down to the water to drink, then get stuck in the mud and can’t get loose. Scavengers attack the top parts of them and remove the skin and smaller bones, so only the large leg bones, ribs etc are left to fossilise.

I took many more notes, as it’s all fascinating, but I’ll leave it now. (I’m sitting at the Bourke Tourist Information Centre using their wifi and I’m all by myself. It’s nearly wine o’clock so I want to finish this soon.)

Yet another reminder to drive carefully!

I was on the road, with only one bar on my phone, when Tom32 rang.

He and Sophie have just come back from Adelaide, where they had a long weekend.

“I asked her to marry me, and she said YES!” he said.

I screamed with joy… and then my phone went dead.

ARGH! I wanted to hear the rest of it all. I was in torment! I had to wait a few hours later when I grabbed the Wifi from my motel.

(I learned why my phone is not constantly in touch, even though I’m with Telstra. It turns out that because I’m with Aldi Mobile – which uses the Telstra network – I’m being punished by Telstra. Damn.)

So now I have another daughter! What with Georgia last year, daughters are coming out of the woodwork!

I’m so happy that she said yes. She’s very good for my son and I think they make a great couple.

Yes. Life is wonderful.

Dad Joke of the Day:

Dad Joke of the Day:

4 Comments

  1. sandyg61

    The number of dinosaurs found in such a short time is really amazing. We both enjoyed our trip learning their stories.
    Great family news to learn on your trip. 🙂

  2. Susan

    Happy Thanksgiving Frogdancer!

    It’s Thanksgiving Day in the US and I am thankful that you so generously, share your adventures in retirement!

    Blessings for you and your family today!

    • FrogdancerJones

      Thank you! I hope you and yours had a lovely day.

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