Australian farmers unleash dinosaur rush as fossil findings rewrite history

WINTON, Australia – It took a moment to spot the fragment, initially: Fist-size and unnaturally smooth, nestled between shrubs teeming with burrs in an endless expanse of arid plains.

But after the first, the others were easier to pick out, gleaming dirty white against the red earth and run through with a honeycomb texture.

Dinosaur bones.

“They’re bloody everywhere,” marvelled Dr Matt Herne, curator of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum.

About an hour’s drive from the town of Winton, he was inspecting the fossils for the couple who had found them, farmers whose property stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions.

(The couple requested anonymity, not wanting the attention that would come if it were known that bones were on their property.)

“It’s spongy bone. Just like a sheared steak bone,” Mr Herne said. “These fragments are telling us that they’ve probably come up from something underneath, and it’s probably quite a large animal.”

For as long as palaeontologists have been looking, dinosaur fossils were extraordinarily rare in Australia, and the continent was a missing piece in scientists’ understanding of dinosaurs globally.

But it is now experiencing a dinosaur boom, with a flurry of discoveries made over the past two decades that is rewriting the country’s fossil record.

Near-perfect skulls and teeth. A string of new species. Some of the biggest dinosaurs ever recorded. And many of them have begun with a farmer, tripping over an unusual-looking rock, in the sparsely populated plains of outback central west Queensland, where sheep outnumber people.

“Before these discoveries started coming out of central western Queensland, Australian dinosaurs were absolutely, extraordinarily rare,” said Dr Matt Lamanna, a palaeontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh in the US.

The palaeontological community “collectively assumed that dinosaurs were really, really hard to find in Australia”, he added.

That all changed, according to scientists, when Mr David Elliott, a farmer near Winton, came across some fossils on his farm in 1999.

It was not unusual for residents in central west Queensland to stumble upon ancient remains.

Mr Elliott, 66, recalled how his father would often come home after a day’s work on the family farm with his pockets bulging with fossils. Once he took over the farm, he also kept one eye on the ground while mustering his sheep, and eventually collected enough fragments to cover a pingpong table.

But locals largely kept their findings to themselves, fearing that publicising them would bring a flood of scientists, bureaucracy and red tape into their lives.

When Mr Elliott decided to contact a palaeontologist two years later, “everyone said, ‘Oh, mate, they’ll build a national park and take you over’”, he recalled. “We were very much a test case for the region. No one else was putting their hand up,” he added.

It was lucky he did, as the resulting excavation upended palaeontologists’ understanding of how to find dinosaur fossils in Australia.

Earlier palaeontologists had assumed that small fragments like those found by Mr Elliott were the last remains of complete fossils that had been weathered down into nearly nothing over the ages, and now had little scientific value.

Mr Elliott thought differently. Having lived and worked on the land all his life, he knew that parts of things deep underground could often be seen on the surface. He believed that the fragments could be markers pointing the way to dinosaur graveyards far below the surface.

When the scientists arrived on his property, he got his excavator and started to dig. His suspicions were confirmed: About 1.5m down, the earth was teeming with chunks of bone.

“That really is the watershed point,” said Dr Scott Hocknull, a palaeontologist at the Queensland Museum, who was there. Simply by digging down farther than earlier palaeontologists had done, “you transition from not finding anything to finding everything”.

More discoveries followed on Mr Elliott’s property. He set up his own museum in a shed, which would later become a non-profit called the Australian Age of Dinosaurs. Locals who knew and trusted him started coming to him with their own findings.

Palaeontologists started using the same method to unearth more bones around the region, including of one of the largest dinosaurs in the world.

A palaeo-tourism industry quickly emerged. Palaeontologists who once left the country, believing that the only way to advance their careers was overseas, flocked back.

Dinosaur excavations were organised, where volunteers exhumed dozens of bones at a time. And for locals in the region, who had been watching their towns steadily shrink over the decades, wariness began to turn into a sense of possibility.

One Saturday in May, inside a pit about 1.5m deep, volunteers – who pay up to A$3,700 (S$3,300) each to attend a one-week dig – were hard at work. Many said they were fulfilling long-held palaeontology aspirations that had once seemed impossible in Australia.

Ms Cheryl Condon, 76, said that this dig was the eighth she had attended. She said she had always been interested in the prehistoric past, but never considered it a viable career option when she was young.

“There weren’t dinosaurs in Australia at that point,” she said. Gesturing at the dozen bones being uncovered around her, she added jokingly: “I don’t know where these all came from.”

As Mr Elliott watched the ancient past being painstakingly chipped out of the ground on the same dig, he considered the future.

“You’re thinking about how that’s going to contribute to your museum and how that museum is trying to fit that to and tell the story of Australia,” he said. “And the other thing, for me, is keeping regional Australia alive.” NYTIMES