Winton - Australia's Dinosaur Country

Winton is in the heart of dinosaur country.  We are constantly amazed by how much there is to see in and around the small country towns we are visiting on our travels and Winton is no exception.  The Information Centres usually have really good pamphlets of things to see and do.  Here we picked up information on some self guided drives which we'll do.

"Banjo" Patterson wrote Waltzing Matilda in this area and there's a statue to him outside the Waltzing Matilda Centre, which houses a good museum and the Visitor Information  Centre.  We spent a couple of hours there looking at the exhibits about Waltzing Matilda, the Art Gallery, seeing some of the history of the area and looking at the many exhibits and memorabilia.  There was a good presentation on the story behind the song and its history and also a short video about the region.  We spent our first day looking at the  attractions in the town.

We walked through the Corfield & Fitzmaurice General Store which is a historic building.  The inside is just as it would have been in it's heyday as the town's general store.  These days they sell mainly locally produced arts and crafts and also have a museum with fossils, dinosaur bones and a display of the types of kitchen items the store would have sold many years ago.

There's quite a bit of street art, with many sculptures in the landscaped median strip of the main street.  We saw the Open Air Movie Theatre, which is still in use and which has the World's Largest Deck Chair.  Even the garbage bins have a dinosaur theme.

300 million years ago Winton was in the Great Inland Sea and 100 million years ago dinosaurs roamed the swampy forests of this area.  There are several drives into "dinosaur country".  We took the day trip to Lark Quarry, about 100km into the bush.  The scenery was amazing and we travelled into jump-up country.  These features have a very hard rock top, usual a very hard rock like ironstone, sitting on top of the softer sandstone or mudstone.  This structure makes the jump-ups fragile and susceptible to erosion and had resulted in their distinctive shape.

Lark Quarry is the location of the world's only known dinosaur stampede and we went to see the footprints which have been preserved in what would have been the muddy billabong foreshores.  There are thousands of footprints, made by possibly hundreds of dinosaurs ranging in size from small carnivorous chicken, to vegetarian emu to a large predatory tyrannosaur.  

Speculation is that the small and medium sized animals were feeding and drinking at the billabong when the large predator arrived and caused the stampede.  The footprints are very well preserved in the fully self sustained building and it's easy to imagine the chaos that would have been occurring millions of years ago.

The drive back to Winton was through mitchell grass plains.  There was a bushfire in the area, the black smoke is caused by burning spinnifex which has a waxy coating to preserve moisture in the plant.




The following day we visited the Australian Age of Dinosaurs, about 20 km out of Winton.  This is divided into 2 sections with 30 minute tours of each.  Near the entrance is a replica of "Banjo", possibly the predator which caused the stampede at Lark Quarry.  He stands about 4m high but has formidable claws and would have run at a sustainable speed around 30kph. At the Museum we saw a video which took us from 500 million years ago through the ages to 100 million years ago when dinosaurs were prevalent in the area.

Our guide explained some of the biomechanics of the dinosaurs and we saw some of the bones of "Matilda" one of the largest dinosaurs found in Australia at 20m high - that's REALLY BIG!!

Then we drove over to the Laboratory where the real work is done.  Bones were originally discovered accidentally by farmers, often when mustering.  These days organised digs are arranged in the cooler months.  The fossilised bones with surrounding rock and earth are removed from the dig site after being wrapped in foil and hessian and plaster cast and are stored in the laboratory until needed.  As well as academics and qualified palaeontologists, volunteers can pay to spend time working on the fossils and on digs which are held in the cooler months.  It would be quite a thrill to see a dinosaur bone emerging from its encasing rock. Maybe this is something we should keep on our list.

On our return we took the River Red Gum drive through the Bradenberg National Park.  More spectacular scenery at Engine Hole, a popular picnic and swimming spot; and Skull Hole, the site of a massacre of aboriginals in the 1800s.  We stopped off for a walk around the old homestead buildings where the ranger station is located.  We passed several large termite mounds and saw plenty of wedge tailed eagles.  Unfortunately we weren't quick enough with the camera to get photos - we'll get some eventually as there are plenty of eagles in this countryside.