Winton: Age of Dinosaurs and sunset tour.

We travelled from Cloncurry to Winton on the 30th of July, it was windy and we were driving straight into it. Absolutely awful for fuel economy , but we made it safely which is all that matters.

I was tidying up some lose ends on the crochet rug i’ve been working on, on and off and just couldn’t resist taking this photo.

Anyway to the interesting stuff

We went to the 

Australian Age of Dinosaurs museum

And we loved it.

Despite the lovely blue skies it was freezing. The museum is located just out of Winton on what they colloquially call a jump up. Basically a hill but it has shear drop off’s on the side, i ll try and explain it later. Anyway it was blowing a gale. 

Above is what they call a negative fossil, this fossil is fifty four metres long and was found by accident by a local farmer. It was named the snake creek track site.  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately as i will explain in a minute, it was left in the paddock for several years before its importance was recognised. This led to some weather damage, and it led to cracking, which ultimately made it easier for them to lift the fossil up piece by piece and moved it up to the top of the  “jump up” where a specially designed building would protect it from the weather.

When you look at the above image you can see a crescent shape on the right, this is the imprint of the front foot of a Saurapod and the triangle shape with the circle in the back is the impression of its back foot. This negative fossil has the foot prints of several different animals including turtles, crocodiles, small theropod dinosaurs and ornithopod dinosaurs. Its all a bit complex how they were fortunate enough to end up with these tracks, but basically this was a muddy area beside water , or possibly in shallow water and because everything just happened the right way it has been forever been preserved . This area was really amazing we had a great guide called Tennyson who was very passionate. Pointing out that there were foot prints of a jnr Saurapod that appeared to be running across the path of an adult and you can actually see the change in the adults footprints when it tried to miss standing on the baby.

The sculptures above were created to represent the adult and baby Saurapod. 

 

 The above sculpture is Velociraptor these creatures fit prints were also able to be seen in the snake creek track, these creatures were carnivorous and Tennyson explained they were between the size of a chicken and turkey.  

As part oof our tour , there was a self guided area that showed many dinosaur sculptures in the natural environment , doing what they would have done. We also got to see the fossil preparation area, which you can volunteer to work at and also at the end we were able to see the fossils of Matilda a (sauropod) and Banjo (theropod) that were found close to each other , they believe that Matilda possibly was stuck in the mud and that banjo was attempting to attack her and she possibly killed him with her tail. 

The bones above show the bones of Matilda’s front feet, in the position they were found.

After the museum we did a tour with a local guide Red Dirt tours

that took us up onto one of the jump ups (Mesa or butte ) to explore and to see the sunset. A mesa or butte (Jump up) is a flat topped mountain  (mesa) or hill Butte with steep sides. 

We visited Rangelands Station’s Mesa where the erosion has created rifts (small channels) in the rock. The guide explained that the Mesa is made of several different types of rock, in this situation the rock under is easily eroded 

The image above shows a rift where the roots of a fig tree have travelled down .

The above outcrops show the extent of the erosion. These will continue. to erode, resulting in the hard upper layer collapsing and crashing to the earth.

And some little bats have made their home in one of the rifts.

It was really interesting and we had a lovely sunset.

Until the next blog 

Everyday deserves a story

The Touring Knights