Australian Heritage Festival

 Sally Hurst from Find a Fossil is hosting some events as part of the Australian Heritage festival.

A few of them feature our sites and palaeontologists. Check out our website or Sally's for details: April 2025 | Dinodreaming.

Noddyland Day 2

 

Adam and Corrie extract rock

Lesley and Mary have a chat

Melissa and Doris

Adam, Corrie and John extract rock

John, Corrie and Adam

Adele examines a mystery bone

Lesley and Adele confer

Peter, Doris and Lesley

Adam finds a fossil on a big rock

Peter and Doris off to look for footprints

Doris and Peter

Adele looks for surface fossils

Adele and Corrie look for surface fossils

Cleaning the shore platform

Noddyland

 A small number of our most experienced crew decided to explore Noddyland and see what we might find. We found 7 bones, 2 of which we kept.

Buckets ready for extracted rock

The crew confers

The early morning light

Extraction about to begin

What a place to work

Corrie

The crew photo

Peter finds a fossil

Adam finds a fossil

Adam makes the international symbol for
“I found a Cretaceous fish palate”

Alan breaking rock

Bones from the 2025 Field Season

Just looking at bones found in the rock we extracted this year, here is the breakdown by extraction day (which is not always the day we found the fossil for rock we transported to the house) and whether we initially kept or discarded it.

You can see the week that we lost to bad tides.

How good was 9th Feb!

Power at the dig house

When we stay at the dig house, we pretty much live in the garage and back yard. It’s the only place that fits 20 of us.

The garage only has one power point, and we run the fridge, the urn, the microwave, a toaster and some extra light off it.

Knowing that almost every digger has a phone to charge, we put a power board in the laundry and a big sign near the garage power point.

 

Keeping the buckets separate

 This year, we were especially careful to make sure that we were able to assign a bucket number to each fossil found. Which left us with a problem to solve: how do we make sure that the rocks left unprocessed at the end of the dig don't get mixed in together? We know that if we left them in their buckets in Lesley's shed, they would not stay that way for long.

The answer? Store the contents of each bucket in a separate sandbag! Amber and Corrie labelled each sandbag (with lovely new metal labels we bought from the gardening department of the hardware store) and each tray (with the cloth tape labels we used at site) and stacked them in the shed, where they should remain safe and separate until our next rock-breaking session.

And look - they even stacked them in reverse date order so we will process the oldest ones first!

Sandbags for each "bucket" - photo by Amber

Field Catalogue transcription

I just asked a generative AI tool to use OCR and translate a page of our handwritten Field Catalogue into Excel for me.

Here is the output of my first attempt:

I am glad that John W appears to have morphed into a successful author from Dresden, but that does not really help me!

Distracted by a puzzle

This year, Lesley brought a wooden puzzle to the dig house. When it was too dark to work, some of our diggers tried to solve it. Sachi from Week 1 spent longest staring at it, but Astrid from Week 3 was the one who solved it…

Sachi working on the puzzle

Sachi still working on the puzzle

Sachi still working on the puzzle

Sachi still working on the puzzle

Sachi still working on the puzzle

Astrid solves the puzzle

Scorpions

 Each day during the dig, we do a couple of quizzes saved from newspapers throughout the year. We happened upon an older quiz, from The Age in late 2022. There was a question about an Ignoble prize winning study about the effects of constipation on the mating habits of scorpion. This raised a lot of questions and became a topic of conversation for about a day. 

Pat gave Mary a scorpion in celebration.

Mary is surprised by the scorpion

Wendy gets friendly with the scorpion

Friday 21st February - last day at site

 

The crew gaze down at the site

Geordie finds a fossil

Astrid takes notes about the fossils and rocks

An imploded fish

Alan studies the layers

The crew heading back from site

Our permit sign looking worse for wear after 20 days

John, Alan and Tom

John, Tom, Alan and Astrid

Astrid takes notes about the hole crew

Adele finds a lovely fossil

Astrid and Amber excited about blackboards and fossils

Astrid’s whiteboard of the day

Possible vert

Fossil

Amber carries a bucket.