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Thursday 10th March – 4pm AEDT
Online
04.00PM – Daniel Muggleton – Stand-up Comic
04.10PM – Robyn Mackenzie & Mel Wilkinson – How the discovery of Cretaceous dinosaurs around Eromanga (Qld) led to the establishment of a world-class museum.
04.50PM – Happy Hour – Q&A + Networking
What geologist doesn’t love dinosaurs! It has always been a bucket list topic of mine to have covered on geohug, so I’m super excited to have Robyn Mackenzie & Mel Wilkinson from the Eromanga Natural History Museum joining us this week.
The ENHM collection represents the most significant regional collection of fossils from central Australia, including the Australotitan cooperensis, Australia’s largest dinosaur species!!!
Details of Australia’s largest dinosaur, Australotitan cooperensis, have just been published. Similar to other recently discovered dinosaurs in central Queensland, the bones are hosted in sediments of the Cretaceous aged Winton Formation, the final unit deposited in the Eromanga Basin. Despite the extremely wide distribution of the Winton Formation little attention has been focussed on the unit. The Winton Formation is up to 1.2 kilometres thick, consisting largely of fine grained volcanogenic fluvial sediments that are diachronous in nature and have been extensively modified post deposition. This has resulted in a residual distribution of the Winton Formation that poses difficulties in placing the dinosaur discoveries in an any accurate chronological, biostratigraphic or local stratigraphic context.
Robyn Mackenzie & Mel Wilkinson
Robyn Mackenzie
For the last 36 years I have been a South Western Qld landholder, helping to run a now fourth generational family business on 110,000 hectares of merino sheep and cattle grazing land. Although for the last 18 years my focus has definitely shifted away from the family business to the dinosaur, other fossil discoveries and the development of the ENHM.
I am now a field palaeontologist and very much an amateur everything else to do with Australian geology, and have had life long interest in arid natural history. Over the past 18 years, I have learnt on the job by surrounding myself with the experts and immersing myself in their fields of palaeontology, geology and natural history.
I have built on what success I have had so far, by bringing others with me, keeping things in context, not excepting mediocracy, sheer doggedness not to give up if it is something really worth doing and last but by no means the least being lucky enough to have one of Australia’s richest dinosaur fossil fields in my backyard. As a natural collector I now find myself designing and developing a major Outback Australian Natural History Museum to house the fossil collections of the Eromanga dinosaurs, Eulo megafauna and microfauna and much more!
Mel Wilkinson
Mel Wilkinson has a 38 year career as an exploration geologist in the oil and gas industry and has experience in both conventional and unconventional resources, primarily in eastern Australia, but also China, the Timor Sea and Gippsland. He is interested in all things rock related and the stories that rocks can tell and has a passion for field geology, evolution, and of course dinosaurs.
Mel has been involved with the Eromanga Natural History Museum since 2007 and as one of the directors is passionate about understanding the Cretaceous Winton Formation and undertaking field work and dinosaur digs and involving the community in the process.
Details of Australia’s largest dinosaur, Australotitan cooperensis, have just been published. Similar to other recently discovered dinosaurs in central Queensland, the bones are hosted in sediments of the Cretaceous aged Winton Formation, the final unit deposited in the Eromanga Basin. Despite the extremely wide distribution of the Winton Formation little attention has been focussed on the unit. The Winton Formation is up to 1.2 kilometres thick, consisting largely of fine grained volcanogenic fluvial sediments that are diachronous in nature and have been extensively modified post deposition. This has resulted in a residual distribution of the Winton Formation that poses difficulties in placing the dinosaur discoveries in an any accurate chronological, biostratigraphic or local stratigraphic context.
