In addition to Dinosaur Cove and Dinosaur Cove East, a third site was soon identified, which came to bear the nickname ‘Slippery Rock’.

Dinosaurs are often seen as prehistoric creatures, but they are actually still alive in our sense of them! By the end of the first dig, equal quantities of fossils had been collected at both sites, including several significant dinosaur bones and a tooth. Helen Wilson says people’s reactions to the living conditions ranged from “indifference to complaining to shock and hysteria”.Some quality finds were uncovered, including the pelvis of an unidentified theropod and some ‘weird’ leg bones from a leaellynasaur, which Lesley Kool counts as one of the highlights of her work on the project. years later, the exploration and excavation of the Dinosaur Cove site was conducted by teams of volunteers overseen by Tom Rich and Patricia Rich. Unfortunately, in the darkness of the cross tunnel, a string of articulated vertebrae and associated limb bones found close to Leaellynasaura’s skull were thrown outside on the mullock heap. Seven weeks later, the three locations had yielded several hundred bone fragments and 368 bags of fossil-bearing rock. Tom Rich cringed – if getting the official nod to jackhammer had been difficult, what would the authorities say about dynamite?

In 1991, the challenge at Slippery Rock was to construct a man-made pillar in the first cross-tunnel, so that the fossil-rich rocky pillar currently shoring up the roof could be removed. It was soon apparent that Leallynasaura, like birds today, may have maintained a constant body temperature by foraging all winter long. There was never a dull moment in camp according to Helen Wilson, with spirits highest in the evenings after a few drinks. In an article in the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Journal (Issue 6, 2008) I dubbed the period between 1984 and 1994 ‘a decade of dedication’, thanks to the persistence of an American-Australian team headed by palaeontologists Tom Rich and his wife, Pat Vickers-Rich. A fossiliferous layer spreading out onto the foreshore from Dinosaur Cove East was the first target.

Bill’s generosity and support would be repeated time and again over the next ten years, but, in that first difficult year, he quietly insisted that the equipment-hire was never paid for. Dinosaurs fascinate kids because they seem so far away from them; it’s hard to imagine what these animals might have looked or sounded like or how big or small they were when compared with other animals that exist today.

s dig included paying-participants from Earthwatch, an American organisation for science enthusiasts, who joined the volunteers. The discovery of pteranodon eggs turns into a mad dash for adventurous young Riley and his friends to get them to safety and out of nefarious hands. The site had been discovered in 1980 by Monash University student, Tim Flannery, and faculty member of the University of New South Wales, Mike Archer, while out fossicking with the Rich family.It is worth noting that although these dinosaurs lived at polar latitudes, the Cretaceous climate was significantly milder than today, so temperatures within the Antarctic and Arctic Circles were vastly different from the climate at these latitudes today, because the lopsided arrangements of the continents made sea currents and monsoon winds blow across the polar areas and not around them, and so stopped cold pools from developing around the poles. The movie was released on June 1, 2022, after some limited theatrical and targeted promotional screenings. The ‘Friends’ were hell-bent on holding a dinosaur dig and eventually convinced Tom to take them to an enticing deposit on the Otway Coast, an hour and a half’s drive west of Melbourne. Set in a stretch of steep, rugged shoreline, this isolated cove is pounded by the Southern Ocean and blasted by Antarctic winds.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. If climatic conditions then were even remotely similar to Antarctica today, the Gondwanan dinosaurs must have experienced cold winters and months of near-darkness – a challenge not confronted by any known reptile. Excavating a site as demanding as Dinosaur Cove had been a bold move and all those involved agree they were part of something special – something they are unlikely to experience again.The first (west) tunnel took a fortnight to complete and was located near the western extreme of Slippery Rock. As a result, a common way to look for fossils in it was to break each lump with a sledgehammer, and after each blow to examine all new broken surfaces for cross-sections of bone. The eggs were laid by a pterodactyl that escaped from a secret genetics and animal cloning laboratory. As so often happens in life, a chain of random events brought Tom and Pat on a collision course with Dinosaur Cove. For the 1986 dig, the ever-resourceful John installed a flying fox/aerial tramway between the top and bottom of the cliff.