Defendering Australia: Day 57: Winton to Longreach, 200km

Half day tour of the Age of the Dinosaurs museum just out of Winton. Family new (2016), beautifully put together and well organised but after seeing Jurassic Park, it I shard to get TOO excited about a bunch of dinosaur bones. Did find the history (the old inland sea and giant trees over 100m high thing) interesting and did some comparative anatomy. It is amazing how their skeletons are so similar to ours, and the other animals for that matter.

A fun fact: despite the incredible flat country in central Queensland, we crossed the part of Queensland dividing the flow of the rivers. From Winton and north, the rivers flow into the gulf; from Longreach and south, they flow into Lake Eyre.

We are on top of the Great Artesian Basin, which supplies so much of inland Australia with water but we were glad to get out of Winton because the bore water there smells of sulphur; our bathroom smelled like Rotorua.

The dinosaurs in Australia were a late, chance finding. They had been found everywhere in the world except Australia until fairly recently. In 1999, a local farmer (David Elliot) came across a sauropod femur while mustering sheep - then the largest dinosaur bone ever found in Australia - and called the Queensland museum. They sent someone and said there were no more. He didn't believe it, and dug a little deeper and found some significant discoveries. Another local farmer found a dinosaur footprint but the museum couldn't send anyone, so he got the other guy, who, by now, had palaeontologist on site and they uncovered a 70 metre strip of old creek bed full of different dinosaur tracks (and crocodiles, who were around back then). The original property owner (the guy who found the femur) has organised the whole show and it is now an impressive museum that it spread out over several acres on the "jump-up" - a mesa that sits above the surrounding flatlands. It is also used as a "dark sky sanctuary" for stargazing. You can read more about the centre here.