Australian Dinosaurs
Even amongst Australians, Australian dinosaurs are seldom recognised.
"When the Australian palaeontologist Steve Salisbury travelled to South America, he noticed something very unusual about the toy dinosaurs on sale. "You never see any plastic T. rex," he recalls.
The ferocious Tyrannosaurus from North America may still be popular with Australian children but in Argentina, in particular, toy boxes are bursting with a different meat eater: one that once roamed that southern continent, and perhaps ours, called Giganotosaurus. (http://www.smh.com.au/news/earth-hour/gondwana-dinosaurs-rule-ok/2008/03/05/1204402557479.html)"
There are numerous fossil sites in Australia which the majority of the Australian population (let alone the rest of the worl) know of. One of the richest sources of Dinosaur fossils anywhere in Australia is the winton formation. This formation is a rock unit which blankets large areas of cental-western Queensland, Australia. Consisting of sedimentry rocks (eg. sandstone, siltstone and claystone), the sediments that make up these rocks represent the remnamts of river plains that filled the left by the Eromanga Sea (an inland sea that covered large parts of Queensland and central Australia at least four times during the Early Cretaceous).
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The Winton formation is, in some areas, over 400 metres thick, which implies that in order to bring with them such a huge amount of sediment, the rivers that flowed across these plains must have been comparable in size to the present day Amazon or Mississippi. By around 95 million years ago, the job was complete and the inland sea would never be seen again. The Winton Formation is now, as previouslt mentioned one of the richest sources of Dinosaur fossils anywhere in Australia.
There are also numerous other fossil sites in Australia. These other fossil sites include:
- Dinosaur Cove, Victoria
- Strzeleki Ranges, Victoria
- Minmi Corssing, Queensland
- Muttaburra, Queensland
- Hughenden, Queensland
- Cloncurry, Queensland
- Roma, Queensland
- Broome, West Australian
- The Opal feilds or South Australia and New South Wales'
With so many sites, it seems rediculous that so many Australians would be able to debate whether a T-Rex would be able to defeat a Spinosaurus in a fight, or easily be able to tell you the distincive features of a Brachiosaurus, and yet not even know a thing about one of Australia's largest dinosaurs Elliot, let alone Muttaburrasaurus or Ozraptor.
"A lot of popular literature and children's books are dominated by what we know of northern hemisphere dinosaurs," says Doctor Steve Salisbury of the University of Queensland. This point is definately true, which brings me to the conclusion that perhaps primary school teachers should start teaching these many Australian Dinosaur's names before they teach the children what a Tyrannosaurs Rex is.
Personally I find dinosaurs such as T-rex, Triceratops and Stegosaurus interesting, however I find the Australian dinosaurs equally as interesting. Perhaps it is time that Australia took a page out of South America's book and started taking pride in our own unique fossil record as well as those of other countires.
