The original plan was to camp at Bladensberg NP. When we arrived at the designated camp area the cost was $21.80 per night for dry drop toilet, no fires, no water. We are obviously spoilt in Victoria where we can camp at most parks for no cost. After exploring the NP a bit and stopping at the original homestead for lunch we headed back into town to stay at a caravan park at $30/night with flushing toilets, showers, power but no fires.
Bladensberg NP was originally a working sheep station. Driving over the old station it is obvious why it is no longer a viable business. At this time of year there is very little ground water and virtually no feed to be seen. At one time it must have been a successful operation using the state of the homestead, outbuildings and farmhand quarters. The sheering shed was also quite impressive.
Tuesday we headed to Lark Quarry just a short 110km out of town. The first tour for the day is 10am. Now Lark Quarry was never a quarry but in the early 1900s they found a dinosaur footprint. At this point Nicholas would like to say Mr Dandy, grade 4 teacher, was wrong. There were once dinosaurs wandering around Australia and very big ones at that! It wasn't until the 1960s that any further work was done in the area to investigate the dinosaur footprints. Finally in the 1980s a large area was excavated, by hand, to expose the dinosaur foot prints, some 3000 prints. The doctor took back a huge latex impression of all the footprints to study at the museum. What she found was an interesting story by identifying which prints belonged together. She believes that two groups of dinosaurs came down to drink at the water. These were two species of Ornithopods that were the size of chickens and another larger ornithopod. There was one Coelurosaur which was quite a large herbivore. A very large Tyrannosauropus happened upon the drinking lizards and gave chase. The result was a stampede of 150 dinosaurs across the mud. The Tyrannosauropus caught one large ornithopod, it's footprints ended abruptly near Tyrannosauropus!
What we have in Lark Quarry is the world's only discovered dinosaur stampede! There are a lot more footprints to be discovered in the area, however there is no more large footprints so there is no plans to excavate any further.
It was so cold and blustery that we had lunch in the car on the way back to Winton. Yes it was very cold, Nicholas did a run back to the car to get warm clothes from the roof bag before the Lark Quarry tour.
Just outside Winton is the Australian Age of Dinosaurs discovery centre. This was a great experience for all of us. AAOD is a not for profit foundation that once a year conducts a dig for dinosaurs then brings back the discovered bones to the centre for processing for the rest of the year. In storage the AAOD has about 35 years worth of bones for processing. Good job security, maybe a career change for Nicholas! The AAOD has found and processed a meat eating dinosaur called Banjo that stood about five metres tall. In the same dig hole they found Matilda, a massive herbivore. Matilda was about 35m long and 5m tall at her back with a long neck and tail. I know you don't talk about a ladies weight but Matilda came in at 30000kg
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