Happy birthday, Daniel!
We started out this morning celebrating Daniel’s 11th birthday, reading the birthday messages we’d written for him, and him opening a couple of small presents from all of us. His big present from the family comes later in the trip – a penguin encounter in Coffs Harbour! He was very excited for that.
We then headed off for today’s big adventure – the Australian Age of Dinosaurs! There were three parts of the tour – the fossil preparation lab, the collection room and the March of the Titanosaurs exhibition.
When you arrive at the main reception area, it’s a beautifully designed building, and really welcoming. It’s such a funny contrast when you get out to the fossil collection laboratory – it’s just a big shed! Of course, it’s a working environment, and we got a chance to see them working on fossils up close, which was amazing. Our tour guide introduced us to the whole site – it was initially started by a farmer with a desire to preserve the dinosaur fossils that he found on his property. It’s evolved now into a not for profit museum, but is still very much run with the feeling of a small collection run by passionate people (perhaps as contrasted with a state or national museum collection). We learnt a lot about how they slowly work away at the dirt and sandstone around the fossils, but equally, how they just often use super glue or araldite to hold any broken pieces of bone together!
We headed back to the main reception building and into the collection room, which is where a lot of their completed (or semi completed) fossils live. They showed a few videos and talked us though the stories of some of the dinosaurs that they have an understanding of – ones where they’ve been able to collect enough bones to determine what species of dinosaur it is, and what it would’ve looked like. They have a lot of information about two main types of dinosaurs from this part of Australia – a sauropod known as Diamantinasaurus, and a theropod known as Australovenator. As always in cases like this, it was so amazing to see how much they’ve been able to piece together about a 95 million year old story from what they’ve found!
Our last stop was Dinosaur Canyon, and the March of the Titanosaurs exhibition. We caught a shuttle bus (named the Noble Express! – although we never were able to find out why) out to the Dinosaur Canyon, which was about a 5 minute drive along an internal road. The March of the Titanosaurs exhibition was amazing – in an enormous room is a beautifully preserved set of dinosaur footprints, formed in mud that has now become rock. It is about 25m wide by perhaps 75m long. Even more incredible than that was that these fossilised footprints was found in a property many kilometres away, and three women did the majority of painstaking work to move every single part of this section of dirt and rock to its current location where it could be preserved. It took them three years, moving each individual section of rock, a few pieces at a time. But it was amazing to be able to see these footprints and hear what scientists have learnt about how different dinosaurs behave based on what the footprints show.
When we got back we had some lunch at the tables near the reception area, and Daniel and Alexander went off to play in the sand area, which made up a mock fossil dig site. The kids all wanted to spend a bit of their holiday money on some goodies from the gift shop, and so we wandered around there for a little while as well.
This afternoon was spent back in our cottage enjoying a bit of air conditioning (it was about 34º out here today!) – we watched another Lego Masters episode (still got about 5 to go in the season, and we want to finish it before we get back to Sydney), and enjoyed a few cupcakes in place of a birthday cake for Daniel.
Tonight, we headed down the road to the North Gregory Hotel in Winton for dinner together for Daniel’s birthday – famous as the place where Banjo Patterson first performed Waltzing Matilda!
