Monday we visited the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum just out of Winton. It was a fairly small but interesting place – a museum with a difference. It is located on top of a rugged but beautiful Jump-Up, giving a nice view out over the plains of Winton.

Looking out over the plains to the east of Winton

from a different location on the Jump-Up

You don’t just walk around and look at displays at this museum. We started with the Lab tour, which is where they actually do the lab work to expose and preserve the dinosaur bones. The bones have all come from the surrounding farmland, which apparently used to be a river delta flowing up into the gulf. The bones and surrounding rock/dirt get wrapped in aluminium foil and plaster whilst still in the ground, and transported to the lab in this protected state (the bones are very fragile). It is then that the painstaking process of carefully scrapping off the surrounding rock and sediment to fully expose the bones begins. I thought searching for Sapphires was painstaking – this takes it to the next level! The biggest tool they use to remove rock is this tiny air operated hammer jack – not much more than an engraver in size and effect! It might take half to one day to remove a fist sized area of rock from a fossilised bone, ensuring the bone is not damaged!

It’s all very new and recent – it’s only in the last decade or two that the dinosaurs have really been examined in this area. They have two particularly complete and well preserved specimens that they are primarily working on. One a smaller meat eater (see Daniel below), which is a new species – the only specimen found, the other a huge sauropod. They have years of work remaining in cleaning the sediment of the remaining bones just from these two. Interestingly, a lot of this work is done by paying volunteers – yes volunteers actually pay to go and do this painstaking task! For the excitement and science of dinosaurs! Once you’ve done it long enough (ie. completed a 10 day course) you no longer have to pay….

Then we moved onto the ‘museum’ area, which again is a tour, but with some video and a look at the bones for these two animals. They present the bones (those processed & preserved so far) as animations and extrapolate about what they think these animals looked like etc. All in all it was a very good educational visit, despite the relatively high entry cost.

Portion of the bones. Unfortunately I didn’t take many photos – the lab area in particular would have been good to have recorded.

We had wanted to also go and visit the Lark Quarry Dinosaur Trackways, which has preserved – in the ground – a mass of footprints. A dinosaur stampede! However, the 11km corrugated dirt road into the Museum had the motorhome shaking like crazy, so we decided against doing another 110kms of dirt in similar condition, to visit the Lark Quarry.

We spent the rest of the day heading towards Mt Isa. Hundreds of k’s of almost flat grassy (in places…) plains. It was an overcast day, with some light drizzle but no real rain. The flat dry plains of Longreach & Winton continue to a little shy of Cloncurry, where the landscape changes to this rough rocky ground with uneven rocky hills all over the place.

We set up camp half way between Cloncurry and Mt Isa, at Clem Walton Park. When we rolled up to the closed gate Nicole got out and told me it was locked, despite the camps book saying it is only locked when the water level is high. She’ll be more careful in the future – as I got out to check and it wasn’t really locked – just looked like it! It was another lovely night with a camp fire, this time cooking yummy damper for dessert….

View over the water at Clem Walton Park

Motorhome in bottom right corner