Dinosaur Cove Cretaceous 1: Attack of the Lizard King

Product Information

Dinosaurs are often seen as prehistoric creatures, but they are actually still alive in our sense of them! In preparing what was marked as a piece of turtle, Leslie Kool had uncovered the humerus of a prehistoric monotreme. It wasn’t uncommon to get covered in mud from the water-fed drills, making a dip in Lake Copco at high tide an inviting prospect.

years later, the exploration and excavation of the Dinosaur Cove site was conducted by teams of volunteers overseen by Tom Rich and Patricia Rich. Riley Harrison is a young boy who stumbled across the unlikely discovery of dinosaur eggs near his grandfather’s oceanfront home.Their story makes fascinating reading, as does the larger story of the trials and triumphs involved in their discovery.

Dinosaur Cove is a 2022 family adventure film about a boy who discovers dinosaur eggs and must protect them from a crazy scientist. Bill’s generosity and support would be repeated time and again over the next ten years, but, in that first difficult year, he quietly insisted that the equipment-hire was never paid for. Vandersaurean responsible for the creature and its accidental release, try in desperation to recover it and capture young Riley before the public finds out about their diabolical plans. It was a back-breaking effort, which involved convoying bags of sand, gravel and cement from camp to shore, mixing them in a cement mixer and pouring the mix into formwork. Meanwhile, a steady stream of fossils was being excavated from Dinosaur Cove East, under the guidance of volunteer, Nick van Klaveren.The Dinosaur Cove discoveries revealed that Victoria’s polar dinosaurs thrived in such conditions, some foraging all winter long, rather than hibernating as cold climate reptiles do today. 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. The movie is very refreshing in how clean it is (no swearing, bad attitude or disrespectful behavior). In 1903, geologist William Hamilton Ferguson was mapping the rocky coastal outcrops a few kilometres west of Inverloch and uncovered the first dinosaur fossil ever discovered in Australia. 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.

Seven weeks later, the three locations had yielded several hundred bone fragments and 368 bags of fossil-bearing rock.

Subsequent scientific analysis of the fossil material, by a range of scientists including geochemists, palaeobotanists, palaeontologists and geologists, soon revealed more unusual and exciting information. Unfortunately, in the darkness of the cross tunnel, a string of articulated vertebrae and associated limb bones found close to Leaellynasaura’s skull were thrown outside on the mullock heap. It was soon apparent that Leallynasaura, like birds today, may have maintained a constant body temperature by foraging all winter long.