Dinosaur Cove Cretaceous 1: Attack of the Lizard King

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Some quality finds were uncovered, including the pelvis of an unidentified theropod and some ‘weird’ leg bones from a leaellynasaur, which Lesley Kool counts as one of the highlights of her work on the project. The most interesting aspect of the dinosaur is that it predates the appearance of mammals by about 70 million years, so it had no natural enemies.

Tom Rich cringed – if getting the official nod to jackhammer had been difficult, what would the authorities say about dynamite? Their story makes fascinating reading, as does the larger story of the trials and triumphs involved in their discovery. tunnel into the cliff, sufficient to expose the ancient stream channel, which had flowed parallel to the rock face.

In preparing what was marked as a piece of turtle, Leslie Kool had uncovered the humerus of a prehistoric monotreme.

years later, the exploration and excavation of the Dinosaur Cove site was conducted by teams of volunteers overseen by Tom Rich and Patricia Rich.On good days, the sea was a millpond; on bad days the chilling southerly winds whipped the sea to a frenzy and the crack of waves breaking on the rocks could be heard at the camp, two kilometres away. An enormous storage shed had been constructed to protect caravans and gear from corrosion, a platform-scaffold had been erected over the Slippery Rock entrance and redundant tunnels had been fitted out with shelving.

As the rift valley sank, the deposits were overlaid by sediment, which turned to rock under pressure. He says the fact that it wasn’t predated soon after injury suggests Leaellynasaura was a social animal that may have lived in groups. A jack-of-all-trades and a collector of old machinery, John had the gift of being able to construct a solution to any problem. This article (and photos) is condensed from A Decade of Dedication: the digs of Dinosaur Cove; Issue 6 Australian Age of Dinosaurs Journal, 2008. Over geological time since, the rock was pushed so deep that heat and pressure hardened it much, before it came again to the surface.Heavy mining equipment and dynamite was used to blast away overlying strata to uncover the fossiliferous rock layers in the cliff face. In an article in the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Journal (Issue 6, 2008) I dubbed the period between 1984 and 1994 ‘a decade of dedication’, thanks to the persistence of an American-Australian team headed by palaeontologists Tom Rich and his wife, Pat Vickers-Rich. As for what is a “dinosaur” many people say that any creature that has lived for more than 65 million years ago qualifies as one, this would mean that birds, fish, mammals are all included in this classification. Analysis of the climate revealed mean temperatures as low as -2˚C, leading to the conclusion that the hypsilophodontids may have been warm-blooded.