For many years, Mike Cleeland has been delighting young visitors to the Flat Rocks site with his famous searches for dinosaur remains, both during the dig and more recently through the Bunurong Environment Centre.
Most trips, at least one visitor finds a dinosaur bone, and a couple of others isolated, rounded stones in the conglomerate. For many years, Mike has speculated that these may be gastroliths (stomach stones). Recently he stumbled across a University of California Museum of Palaeontology (UCMP) article that summarises the current thinking. There is still no evidence that small-bodied ornithopods or toothed theropods used gastroliths. Of course, nothing says that they couldn't have...
So I reckon Mike's going to keep sending young visitors home with a gastrolith and encouraging them to learn a bit more science.
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