The Winton area of Queensland is home to many fossilised dinosaurs but why? There are fragments of a single leg or jaw found in Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, as well as a fragment or two found in NSW, WA and SA, but why is central Qld so rich fossilised dinosaur remains?

Divine Angel said:

The Winton area of Queensland is home to many fossilised dinosaurs but why? There are fragments of a single leg or jaw found in Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, as well as a fragment or two found in NSW, WA and SA, but why is central Qld so rich fossilised dinosaur remains?

To get one, you need an animal to die in the right place. It needs to be buried before it can be disturbed by other animals. It then needs to be undisturbed for the thousands/millions of years it take for us to find it, and again needs to be found.

I once read that if the process of fossilisation is so rare that if the entire population of humans were to die, in a few million years there would be something like only 1 1/2 skeletons worth of bones.

The bodies that we so carefully place into the ground in caskets, are the skeletons any better preserved than if left to the elements (notwithstanding hungry animals etc).

Well I guess they would at least be tidily in one place. And in rows.

Australian dinosaur discoveries

Very few dinosaur fossils have been found in Australia, yet Australia has many rocks of the right age to contain dinosaurs. Why have so few been found?

Australia is mostly a low, flat land, with few mountains, deep river valleys, canyons or other geological features that expose rocks that may contain dinosaur fossils. Most of Australia’s vast plains are very ancient, and any exposed fossils in these areas are likely to have been destroyed by weathering.

(then follows a look at dinosaurs in Australia state by state): http://museumvictoria.com.au/discoverycentre/infosheets/dinosaurs-in-australia/

Pat Vickers-Rich lists David Attenborough as a referee in her 46 pp CV…

During the Cretaceous there was a shallow inland sea spreading from the NT/Qld to SA, effectively cutting Australia into two sections. Much of this region comprises a very fine clay (kaolinite in which opal is found), and when this sea began to dry out it would create many environments where large dinosaurs could become trapped and die, predated upon or simply perish and where sometimes the bones or more, would be covered in the fine clay sediment. This region would therefore be the most prospective dinosaur region in Australia for this period of time.

> To get one, you need an animal to die in the right place. It needs to be buried before it can be disturbed by other animals. It then needs to be undisturbed

Perhaps even more important than that, it needs to die in a place where the groundwater is alkaline. That means that any dinosaur that dies among vegetation is lost because vegetation produces acid soils and groundwater on decomposing. The best place for a dinosaur to be fossilized is in an area with limestone bedrock that ALSO is in a situation where the limestone is not actively weathering, and that’s a problem because exposed limestone is almost always rapidly weathering away.

I don’t know much about Winton, but the most successful fossilizations of Australian Cenozoic fauna at Riversleigh occurred in limestone sinkholes where the cavern roofs collapsed slowly or quickly on top of the animals creasing a depositional rather than erosional environment. I suspect that the same is true of the fossil assemblage at the Naracoorte caves in South Australia.

mollwollfumble said:

> To get one, you need an animal to die in the right place. It needs to be buried before it can be disturbed by other animals. It then needs to be undisturbed

Perhaps even more important than that, it needs to die in a place where the groundwater is alkaline. That means that any dinosaur that dies among vegetation is lost because vegetation produces acid soils and groundwater on decomposing. The best place for a dinosaur to be fossilized is in an area with limestone bedrock that ALSO is in a situation where the limestone is not actively weathering, and that’s a problem because exposed limestone is almost always rapidly weathering away.

I don’t know much about Winton, but the most successful fossilizations of Australian Cenozoic fauna at Riversleigh occurred in limestone sinkholes where the cavern roofs collapsed slowly or quickly on top of the animals creasing a depositional rather than erosional environment. I suspect that the same is true of the fossil assemblage at the Naracoorte caves in South Australia.

Peat bogs are very acid. Terrific preservation there.