A boy with a statue of a dinosaur, named Banjo (after the Australian bush poet Banjo Paterson), at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum.Credit...David Maurice Smith for The New York Times
The New York Times has a story about dinosaurs in Australia. For a long time, dinosaur fossils were strangely rare in Australia. Now, with discoveries near Winston, Australia, dinosaur bone is seemingly everywhere!
It took a moment to spot the fragment, initially: fist-size and unnaturally smooth, nestled between shrubs teeming with burrs in an endless expanse of arid plains. But after the first, the others were easier to pick out, gleaming dirty white against the red earth and run through with a honeycomb texture.
Dinosaur bones.
“They’re bloody everywhere,” marveled Matt Herne, curator of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum. About an hour’s drive from the town of Winton, he was inspecting the fossils for the couple who had found them, farmers whose property stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions. (The couple requested anonymity, not wanting the attention that would come if it were known that bones were on their property.)
“It’s spongy bone. Just like a sheared steak bone,” Mr. Herne said. “These fragments are telling us that they’ve probably come up from something underneath, and it’s probably quite a large animal.”
