A farmer by the name of David Elliott found a large (of course it would be large) dinosaur thigh bone on his Winton, Qld property back in 1999. He quickly despatched it to the museum folk in Brisbane and a dig was organised on his property. Teams painstakingly marked out dig areas and set to work with shovels and toothbrushes. In the meantime David brought in a front end loader and scraped away the layer of top soil exposing more bones.

This is the method now employed and David has set up a non profit charitable organisation with a team of scientists and paying volunteers. Australian Age of Dinosaurs has a record sized collection of dinosaur bones and the tourism that it generates has caused an annual increase of 5% to Winton’s population. There’s that ‘have a go’ mentality again. The tour of the facility is excellent and I was able to watch the team painstakingly grinding the rock away from the bones. Even though they collect enough bones each year to provide them with four years work of restoration, they continue to run the annual dig as this provides the facility with valuable funds.

One could say that Winton is a place of dead things, really old dead things.