Sat 21st June – Day 42: Lark Quarry - Winton - Longreach

Up just after sunrise in our quest to make Lark Quarry by 10. Outside the camper a herd of cows had obviously sheltered in the nearby trees overnight. Chloe came outside with her stick (‘wand’) and yelled ‘Wingardium leviosa” straight out of Harry Potter and the mob took off across the paddock – she is now convinced of her magical powers!
More dirt and we crossed the Diamantina River today. It brought back the song by Redgum called ‘The Diamantina Drover’ where he describes how the ‘rain never falls on the dusty Diamantina’ and the drovers life in this harsh country around ‘Old Cork Station’ which we also passed. As we drove over the river, only small muddy puddles and steep red/brown earth banks hinted at the presence of a river that probably hardly ever flows, yes it’s a harsh life out here.
Onto Lark Quarry, 110km south of Winton is the site of the only recorded fossilized dinosaur stampede on earth. In the middle of no-where this $4M complex protects more than 3300 fossilised footprints from the damaging elements outside.
In this place, around 95 million years ago, a large herd of small two legged dinosaurs gathered on the banks of a forest lake to drink. The herd was stalked by a large theropod – four tonnes of sharp-clawed, meat-eating dinosaur. The herd panicked, stampeding across the muddy flats to escape the theropod’s hungry jaws. As the guide explains all this, he points out the evenly spaced footprints of the therapod as he approaches the herd, then the foot prints widen and show marks of slippage as he turns in the mud to chase & corner his prey. The smaller prints show confusion and collisions as the smaller dinosaurs rush to get away - their only escape, back towards the stalker and onto freedom. What happened after this we will never know as that is all the prints can tell us, but we all thought the 200km round trip was well worth it!
Back to Winton to find everything is shut on a Saturday afternoon so we decided to push onto Longreach. It was ironic that the most road kill we have ever seen is on this road, where the kangaroo is the image of such a highly successful Australian company. It must amaze overseas visitors to see hundreds of them lying dead by the side of the road and then see them plastered all over the memorabilia of the Qantas museum.
At the caravan park the kids are delighted to find 3 heated spas and insist on going in even though the water is barely warm – luckily hot showers afterwards cured their cold blue skins!
Gunnadoo Caravan Park (Powered $40)