travel
When you go Follow Australia’s Dinosaur Trail from Winton to Hughenden before linking with the Flinders Highway to Richmond. To add Eromanga to your dinosaur drive, from Richmond return to Winton and travel via Longreach to Charleville, where the Natural Sciences Loop will take you to Eromanga.
While our search could have ended here, the holiday has now morphed into an expedition, so we return to Winton before continuing southwest via Charleville to Eromanga, where we discover Queensland’s dinosaur graveyard has revealed its biggest secret so far. Australia’s furthest town from the sea was
thrust onto the global stage in 2004 when 14-yearold Sandy Mackenzie discovered a titanosaur fossil more than 90 million years old. Scientists estimate that Cooper, the largest dinosaur found in Australia so far, was 30m long and as tall as a two-storey building, winning Australia a place in the top-10 most colossal fossils finds in the world. We meet the famous sauropod (in parts) on the Australian Dinosaur Giants Tour at Eromanga Natural History Museum. Alongside some dino mates, Cooper is awaiting technicians to undertake more of the painstaking work required to remove sediment that has entombed him for almost 100 million years. When they finish, a two-storey gallery will be built in his honour. For now we can only measure how diminutive we are against a replica of his humungous humerus bone. But we are invited to gently pat the real thing too, a rare prehistoric privilege that accelerates my daughter’s palaeontological aspirations from in bud to flourishing. Who knew ancient history could be so fun?
The Eromanga Natural History Museum.
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