Dinosaur Dreaming

Sunday, 28 April 2013

Koonwarra 24 April

Mike and Pip happy to be
digging on their Anniversary

Prof Tim Flannery shows off
his fossil fish

Tim's Fish

Darren Bellingham has sent me a few photos that he took whilst visiting the Koonwarra dig on Wednesday. Enjoy!

Fish head

Thursday, 25 April 2013

ANZAC Day

Today I headed down to Koonwarra with my friend Peggy to check out the dig there. Here are some photos of the fun. Note our beautiful Hi-Vis vests.

The digger

Mike and Peggy hard at work

The crew

The Prep Table (hay bale)

Dave works the rock face

Peggy finds a beautiful fish

Peggy's fish

We found lots of plant fossils

The crew on top of the rock face

Wendy digs up a fish

Wendy's fish

Sunday, 21 April 2013

A small crew has been looking for fossils near Koonwarra. In 2009, Dr Tom Rich and colleagues had noticed that the Koonwarra sediment looked at bit like that in western Liaoning Province in China (the paper was called A potential Gondwanan polar Jehol Biota lookalike in Victoria, Australia and published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria). So the team is looking for any sign that these sediments might contain feathered dinosaurs, birds, pterosaurs and mammal skeletons.

So far they have found a number of beautiful fish fossils.

Saturday, 30 March 2013

Clowning around with dino sculptures

Here's a few photos of Darren and Phil's trip to the Otway Fly:

Head-butting competition

Talking to a flying reptile

One-armed showdown

First aid training comes in handy

Feeding the Triceratops

Tickling the theropod

Monday, 25 March 2013

Paul Barrett's visit to Museum Victoria

While some of the Dinosaur Dreaming crew were having great fun down in the Otways last week, Lesley was privileged to host visiting palaeontologist Paul Barrett at Museum Victoria. Paul is an expert on ornithischian (plant eaters) dinosaurs and hails from the Natural History Museum in London. He has come to study "Noddy" our baby dinosaur from Inverloch, which was found by Mike Cleeland in 2010. Noddy got his name because he was found in a small rock nodule or concretion on the shore platform north of the Flat Rocks site. He is the first dinosaur skeleton from the Strzelecki Group, south-east of Melbourne and only the fourth dinosaur skeleton found in Victoria, so he is very special.
As well as studying Noddy, Paul also looked at the other specimens in the Early Cretaceous Vertebrate Collection and identified a number of isolated dinosaur skull elements. This new information will be added to the Museum's data base.

Paul Barrett looking at Noddy in the Museum prep lab

On Saturday Paul got the opportunity to visit the Flat Rocks site near Inverloch, where most of the dinosaur bones from the Strzelecki Group are found. We also took him to where Noddy was found, so now he can visualise the setting when he is writing his paper on our little dinosaur.

Paul at the Flat Rocks site, near Inverloch.

Sunday, 24 March 2013

Otways fossil counts

We've had a bumper year at the Otways. Here's the fossil counts (including plant fossils):
Saturday 16th: 0 fossils (horizontal rain chased us off the beach early).
Sunday 17th: 12 fossils.
Monday 18th: 14 fossils.
Tuesday 19th: 26 fossils.
Wednesday 20th: 21 fossils.
Thursday 21st: 23 fossils.
Friday 22nd: 31 fossils.
Saturday 23rd: 14 fossils.

This gives us a grand total of 141 catalogue items for the dig, almost twice as many as 2012. Of course, it's not all about the numbers (we'd rather one spectacular fossil than a dozen undiagnostic scraps). But there are a lot of great specimens in that count, so it's pretty exciting.