Global Courant
At first it took me a while to see the fragment: fist-sized and unnaturally smooth, nestled among bushes full of brambles in an endless expanse of barren plains. But after the first, the others were easier to distinguish, gleaming dirty white against the red soil and continuing with a honeycomb structure.
Dinosaur bones.
“They’re bloody all over,” marveled Matt Herne, curator of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum. About an hour’s drive from the town of Winton, he inspected the fossils for the pair who had found them, farmers whose property stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. (The couple requested anonymity, not wanting the attention that would come if word got out that there were bones on their property.)
“It’s spongy bone. Like a shaved steak bone,’ Mr Herne said. “These fragments tell us they probably came from something below, and it’s probably quite a large animal.”
For as long as paleontologists have looked, dinosaur fossils have been extraordinarily rare in Australia, and the continent has been a missing piece in scientists’ understanding of dinosaurs worldwide. But it’s now going through a dinosaur boom, with a flurry of discoveries made over the past two decades rewriting the country’s fossil record.
Almost perfect skulls and teeth. A series of new species. Some of the largest dinosaurs ever recorded. And many of them started with a farmer, tripping over an unusual looking rock, in the sparsely populated inland plains of Central West Queensland, where sheep outnumber people.
“Before these discoveries came from central west Queensland, Australian dinosaurs were definitely exceedingly rare,” said Matt Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The paleontological community “collectively assumed that dinosaurs were really, really hard to find in Australia,” he added.
That all changed, according to scientists, when David Elliott, a farmer near Winton, came across some fossils on his farm in 1999.
It was not uncommon for residents of Central West Queensland to come across ancient relics. Mr Elliott, 66, recalled how his father often came home after a day’s work on the family farm with his pockets full of fossils. Once he took over the farm, he also kept an eye on the ground as he gathered his sheep, eventually collecting enough fragments to set a ping pong table.
But locals largely kept their findings to themselves, fearing that publishing them would bring a flood of scientists, bureaucracy and red tape to their lives.
When Mr. Elliott decided two years later to contact a paleontologist: “Everybody was like, ‘Oh, buddy, they’re going to build a national park and take you over,'” he recalls, adding, “We were really a test case for the region. No one else raised their hands.”
It was fortunate he did, as the resulting excavation rocked paleontologists’ understanding of finding dinosaur fossils in Australia.
Previous paleontologists had assumed that small fragments, such as those found by Mr. Elliott, were the last remnants of complete fossils that had weathered down to almost nothing over the centuries and were now of little scientific value.
Mr. Elliott thought otherwise. Having lived and worked on the land all his life, he knew that parts of things deep underground often showed on the surface. He believed the fragments could be markers pointing the way to dinosaur burial sites far below the surface.
When the scientists arrived on his property, he grabbed his backhoe and started digging. His suspicions were confirmed: about five feet below, the earth was teeming with chunks of bone.
“That’s really the turning point,” said Scott Hocknull, a paleontologist at the Queensland Museum, who was there. By simply digging further than previous paleontologists had done, “you go from finding nothing to finding everything.”
More discoveries followed in Mr. Elliott. He set up his own museum in a barn, which would later become a non-profit organization called the Australian Age of Dinosaurs. Local residents who knew and trusted him came to him with their own findings. Paleontologists began using the same method to dig up more bones in the region, including from one of the largest dinosaurs in the world.
A paleotourism industry soon emerged. Paleontologists who once left the country, believing the only way to advance their careers was abroad, flocked back. Dinosaur excavations were organized, with volunteers excavating dozens of bones at a time. And for locals in the region, who had seen their cities steadily shrink over the decades, caution began to turn into a sense of possibility.
On a Saturday last month, in a well about five feet deep, volunteers — who pay up to AUD 3,700 or $2,475 each to attend a week-long excavation — were hard at work. Many said they were fulfilling long-held paleontological aspirations that once seemed impossible in Australia.
Cheryl Condon, 76, said this dig was the eighth she had attended. She said she had always been interested in the prehistoric past, but never considered it a viable career option when she was young.
“There were no dinosaurs in Australia at the time,” she said. Gesturing to the dozens of bones uncovered around her, she jokingly added, “I don’t know where all these came from.”
As Mr. Elliott watched the ancient past painstakingly carved out of the ground during the same excavation, he pondered the future.
“You think about how that’s going to contribute to your museum and how that museum is trying to fit that in and tell the story of Australia,” he said. “And the other thing, for me, is keeping regional Australia alive.”
The sheep industry once flourished in this region, but a raw materials crisis and brutal drought have driven many shearers out. Winton’s population has almost halved in the last 20 years to just over 1,100 as people have left to seek better prospects elsewhere.
Tourism could be the answer. Mr. Elliott’s Museum attracted 60,000 people by 2021.
“It’s gone completely crazy,” said Kev Fawcett, the owner of the Winton Hotel. During the pandemic, when Australians were unable to travel abroad, the winter season became so busy that tourists slept in their cars as the city’s three caravan parks and four motels were full. Mr. Fawcett is now renovating the 10 unused rooms in his hotel in anticipation of the next tourist season.
Mr Elliott wants to expand into Australia’s leading natural history museum – something that will attract international visitors and benefit not only Winton, but the other small towns in regional Queensland as well.
“Every city has a little museum and no one comes from all over the world to see that,” he said. “You have to have an important destination for people.”
For Mr Hocknull, the paleontologist at the Queensland Museum, the discoveries they had made so far were only superficial.
“The exciting thing for me is not that the boom has happened, but what the outcome of all this will be over the next 20 to 40 years,” he said. “The dinosaurs will continue to be found. Who knows what we have?”
