WINTON AND HUGHENDEN

Still heading north, the next stop was Winton and the start of the 'Dinosaur Trail'.  Just out of Winton on the top of a mesa (known locally as a jump up) is the newly established Australian Dinosaur Centre.  Set up as a non profit organisation by the station owners who discovered significant dinosaur fossils on their property, it currently employs 10 people full time. Members of the public can volunteer to work in the laboratory after undertaking some training.  Currently they've got heaps more fossil-bearing rocks than they know what to do with - about 35 years' work, they estimate - so if anyone has three months to spare...

From the top of the mesa, you look over what was the ancient Eromangan Sea.  Somewhere under the plain are the fossils of ancient marine creatures and dinosaurs, as well as the Great Artesian Basin.

View from the top of the mesa

About 110 kms south west of Winton is Lark Quarry, the only known fossilized footprints of a dinosaur stampede (shown in the TV series Australia: the time traveller's guide).

The makers of the film Jurassic Park hired a palaeontologist who visited Lark Quarry and, by studying the footprints, figured out how dinosaurs walked, that is like emus - one foot directly in front of the other.  I think I should now have a look at, at least parts of, the movie as I haven't seen it.

I expected to have to go down into a quarry to see the footprints, but they've built an ecologically self-sufficient shed, that maintains a constant temperature, over the fossils to preserve them as they're so very precious.

From Winton to Hughenden, the terrain was a vast plain of golden Mitchell grass with only the occasional tree to be seen.  Hughenden sits on the Flinders River, Queensland's longest river, which flows into the Gulf of Carpentaria.

For small, outback towns, both Winton and Hughenden have done a terrific job with their interpretive centres.  Winton has the very extensive Waltzing Matilda Centre, so called because Banjo Paterson wrote the lyrics to the song while visiting a station near Winton in 1895.  It took us a good two hours to go through the exhibits, and we hadn't finished by chuck out time.

Hughenden has the Flinders Discovery Centre and an incredible collection of fossils, as well as Hughie the Muttaburrasaurus.

About 75 kms north of Hughenden is the spectacular Porcupine Gorge:

It was steep enough going down, but seemed even steeper coming back up. Hot too, especially with the sun radiating off the rock.

Tomorrow we turn west for Richmond, the third and last town in the Dinosaur Trail triangle, then continue west towards the Northern Territory.