SEARCHING FOR AUSSIE DINOSAURS

Our understanding of where to find ancient life in Australia has been turned on its head by a new appreciation of the country's geology. Now the world is looking to our vast outback as the latest hotspot to locate fossils.

- ESME MATHIS

IT’S THE SECOND day of the annual dinosaur dig hosted by Eromanga Natural History Museum (ENHM) and expectations are high. At a dig site at Plevna Downs, a 1210sq.kmworking sheep and cattle property about 90km south-west of the outback Queensland town of Eromanga, six people are kneeling in the dirt, deftly and patiently wielding trowels, dustpans and brushes to painstakingly clear away the sandy soil grain by grain. Sitting loosely between them on the surface are three tailbones of a sauropod, a herbivorous dinosaur that roamed here during the late Cretaceous, some 95 million years ago (mya).

Australia is entering a golden age of dinosaur discovery, following a new appreciation of the continent’s unique geology and how that affects the way we’ve been looking for ancient fossils across the continent. In North America and China – traditionally regarded as the world’s major “dinosaur hotspots” – fossils are usually exposed in the eroding rocks of mountains, hills, valleys and canyons. But that’s not the case in Australia, the world’s flattest continent. Here, the landscape is highly eroded, and because it has been subjected to millions of years of weathering, it was once widely assumed that most of Australia’s dinosaur fossils had eroded over time. But a number of sites across the continent are proving this wrong, and Plevna Downs is one of them.