Outback Queensland is an arresting place. There are the bluegrass plains with their characteristic blacksoil cracking under some of the most expansive skies in the world. There is the dry orange land dominated by hordes of muted Gidgee trees. There are the clumps of spinifex grass that climb mesas, painted in the colours of a sunset.
These are unimaginably wide open spaces punctuated only by diminutive jump-ups, transfigured into geological colossi of Himalayan proportions by the sheer flatness of the place. Dry riverbeds make huge arcs across this oft-parched country. Small towns like Winton and Muttaburra, Hughenden and Richmond, Boulia and Eromanga are islands in this sea of space. In this arid but tropical environment, these settlements — often perched on the only slightly-raised ground for hundreds of kilometres — sometimes become actual islands in a sea of water caused by seasonal rains.
This is a dry land, awash in human history. Yirandali, Wunumara, Kalkadoon, Yalarrnga, Yanda, Pitta-Pitta, Guwa, Yanda, Maiawali, Iningai, Kuungkari, Karuwali, Birria, Dharawala, Wangkumara, and Yawarrawarrka people — among many other First Nations Peoples — inhabit this land. Following colonisation, these cultures survived the brutal Queensland frontier wars as pastoralists raced to exploit the grasslands and scrub what Indigenous people had stewarded for 60,000 years. This is also the country of the 1891 shearers’ strikes that birthed the Labor Party, the landscape that inspired Banjo Patterson when he wrote Waltzing Matilda, and the cradle of QANTAS.
But before all that, this hot, dry, and beautiful land couldn’t have been more different. The Cretaceous sedimentary rocks that have borne Australia’s most significant paleontological discoveries were laid down here around 100 million years ago. Back then, the now-tropical Queensland lay much further to the south. The Australian continent, along with Africa, South America, Antarctica, Aotearoa New Zealand, and India, was a part of Gondawana. Australia straddled the Antarctic circle; its southern half perhaps plunged into a dark polar winter. Cretaceous Queensland wasn’t quite so cold, but it’s temperate and wet environment may have seen snow in winter.
The modern landscape itself is a fossil that prompts thought on the eventual inevitability of extinction. These were the shores of the shallow Eromanga sea — an ancient inland ocean, the final traces of which can be seen in the Great Artesian Basin. In the Cretaceous, the coast of this sea brushed somewhere near Winton. It teemed with life.
Traces of this life can be viewed at the fantastic Kronosaurus Korner museum in Richmond, the western point of the “Dinosaur triangle”. The animals on display however — which, uniquely for a museum, are represented not by casts but the actual fossils — were not dinosaurs. These were great marine reptiles: the nine-metre-long superpredator Kronosaurus — which looked something like a mix between a seal, a turtle and a crocodile — hunted the long-necked plesiosaur Eromangasaurus and the dolphin-like ichthyosaur Platypterygius.
Giant pterosaurs, fossils of which are rare due to their fragile, hollow bones, skimmed fish on the wing from the surface of this sea. Of particular interest at Kronosaurus Korner is “Penny the Plesiosaur”, an almost complete fossil skeleton of a polycotylid. This remarkable animal is preserved in exquisite detail, and remains the most complete plesiosaur skeleton found in Australia to date.
The sediments laid by this calm, shallow sea were the perfect environment to preserve these fragile fossils, creating a hotspot for prehistoric marine creatures. Such fossils can be seen in museums in Richmond, Boulia and Hughenden.
This isn’t the most remarkable trace of prehistoric life one can see in the region, however. A 100km drive on a corrugated dirt road west from Winton will take you to Lark Quarry, understood as the only preserved example of a Dinosaur stampede. Here, in a large shed nestled between bright red hills, you can view an exhilarating prehistoric moment captured in stone.
The trackway preserves a stampede of tiny carnivorous coelurosaurs and small herbivorous ornithopods. Trapped against the shore of an ancient lake, the small dinosaurs were forced to run towards their predator in a striking example of intelligent hunting behaviour. For a long time, the 50cm footprints of the hunter were thought to belong to an animal of T. rex proportions. However, they are now thought to belong to Australovenator: a strangely proportioned 6-metre predator with massive hands and feet.
Unbelievably, it is possible to see preserved in the tracks a moment where the Australovenator tripped over one of its targets, slid for a moment in the mud, and maintained its footing to continue the chase. We don’t know if this ancient hunter was successful in catching its quarry, but regardless, this makes for a veritable Attenborough documentary written in rock — predator vs. prey, 104 million years ago. Being able to see life unfold so far in the past is a truly humbling experience, an immediate slap in the face with the sort of perspective that makes our modern lives seem miniscule.
In nearby Winton (by Queensland standards), at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs museum, one has the unique opportunity of seeing the holotype specimens — the fossils by which the species is known — of the gangly Australovenator. Alongside this carnivore are the remarkable bones of Australia’s own giant sauropods. The 16-metre-long, heavily built Diamintinasaurus and the lither, though similarly long, Wintonotitan can be found here. These long-necked giants — examples of titanosaurs, a type of sauropod endemic across Gondwanaland — are among a multitude of fossils found on the Blacksoil plains surrounding Winton, Hughenden and Muttaburra.
The unique quality of blacksoil is responsible for the Paleontological richness of this area. Blacksoil, during seasonal rains, turns into a morass that, when drying in the arid climate, forms massive cracks up to 5 metres in depth. This constant wet-dry-wet-dry cycle produces a highly mobile soil that constantly turns up new fossil fragments from the sediment beneath. It is this geological quirk we have to thank for the prehistoric treasure trove that is outback Queensland.
I would urge anyone to give the Dinosaur Triangle — and its surrounding area — a visit. A road trip through the region is immensely rewarding, at the very least for its natural beauty and sobering human history. Alongside these facts, however, is its potential for prehistoric imagination. When you survey the plains from the top of a jump-up, you can’t help but imagine a very different landscape: a landscape of shallow seas and verdant forests; plesiosaurs and pliosaurs; of tree-ferns and cycads and sauropods.
I think this kind of imagination is important. It is incredibly humbling to be forced to reckon with the immensely long history of life-on-earth in the places where you can see its traces. It’s a sobering reminder of the fragility of life on earth; an in-your-face warning that extinction not only can happen, but is eventually inevitable. It is a reminder of how small we humans are in the face of the billions of years that the earth has existed. On the one hand, this is a terrifying thought in a world facing a climate catastrophe of our own making. But on another hand — for me at least — it is a comforting feeling. “No matter how hard my life gets, no matter how I feel,” I tell myself, “it is but a trifle compared with even the traces in stone of the billions upon billions of lives that came before me.”
