Dinosaur Cove Cretaceous 1: Attack of the Lizard King

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Young social media sensation Brayden Eaton was cast in the lead role of Riley Harrison. [2] The film was directed by Daniel Knudsen who previously directed Courageous Love and ‘’SKYDOG’’. [3] Dinosaur Cove wrapped up post-production in early 2022. The richest find of petrified dinosaur bones is confined to narrow thin (up to 0.3 m) layers, most likely ancient stream beds serving as repositories of the bones of smaller animals. Dinosaurs are not like any other animal on Earth. They lived millions of years ago, which means they were here before people, insects, and even flowers. Dinosaurs were big and their bodies were different from any other animal alive today. They had many sharp teeth and long claws on their hands and feet to protect themselves from enemies or to hunt for their next meal. Long before humans walked the earth, there was another prehistoric animal that dominated it. It was called a dinosaur. With these fossils, we have learned about dinosaur anatomy and behavior and they have captured the public imagination like no other extinct creatures, capturing their interest with many active research areas.

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. Stress indicators, called ‘lines of arrested growth’, were absent in the hypsilophodontid bones, suggesting that this group had not hibernated like the larger polar dinosaurs. Analysis of the climate revealed mean temperatures as low as -2˚C, leading to the conclusion that the hypsilophodontids may have been warm-blooded. It was soon apparent that Leallynasaura, like birds today, may have maintained a constant body temperature by foraging all winter long. Riley Harrison is a young boy who stumbled across the unlikely discovery of dinosaur eggs near his grandfather’s oceanfront home. The eggs were laid by a pterodactyl that escaped from a secret genetics and animal cloning laboratory. A crazy scientist, who mistakenly released the dinosaur, must retrieve the specimen and the eggs that she has laid. He plans on using the animals as living targets for an exotic hunting preserve. Riley must protect the animals from the crazy scientist and look after the dinosaurs. [1] Cast edit The Dinosaur Cove project attracted volunteers from all walks of life. Many were local university students, lured by Tom Rich’s line, “We can’t pay you, but we can feed you”. Michelle Hird (née Colwell), Natalie Schroder and Helen Wilson (née Brown) were among this high-spirited group. They recall that the food was far from edible in those early years, with no refrigeration, a tight budget and few chefs in camp. Michelle remembers ‘recycled’ rice pudding with chunks of tuna floating in it! Therefore, Tom’s promise of a cubic metre of chocolate to the first person to find a mammal bone must have been an irresistible incentive.Kids love dinosaurs because they are enormous and fascinating creatures. They like to hear stories about their history and imagine what it would be like if they were living today. Dinosaurs fascinate kids because they seem so far away from them; it’s hard to imagine what these animals might have looked or sounded like or how big or small they were when compared with other animals that exist today.

As so often happens in life, a chain of random events brought Tom and Pat on a collision course with Dinosaur Cove. The first of these was their migration to Australia from the USA in 1973, so that Pat could complete her post-doctoral Fullbright Fellowship at Monash University in Melbourne. Tom soon found employment as Curator of Palaeontology at the Museum Victoria, where he attracted the attention of a group of dinosaur enthusiasts called ‘Friends of The Museum of Victoria’. The ‘Friends’ were hell-bent on holding a dinosaur dig and eventually convinced Tom to take them to an enticing deposit on the Otway Coast, an hour and a half’s drive west of Melbourne.

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This article (and photos) is condensed from A Decade of Dedication: the digs of Dinosaur Cove; Issue 6 Australian Age of Dinosaurs Journal, 2008. www.australianageofdinosaurs.com. Further reading Down at the cliff face, the camaraderie and one-upmanship saw the girls giving the guys as good as they got. Bill Hopkins notes “All the girls and women seemed to love working with the noisy tools” then adds cheekily, “all the boys and men loved watching them do it”. 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.

In the 1980s and 90s Dinosaur Cove yielded hypsilophodontid-like dinosaurs as Leaellynasaura amicagraphica and Atlascopcosaurus loadsi, and a Coelurosaur, as well as fragments of what may be a caenagnathid (relatives of the Oviraptors). One fossil from this diverse taxa, collectively called the " polar dinosaurs of Australia", has been interpreted as showing possible adaptations to vision in low light conditions and possibly were warm-blooded; this has been suggested as an explanation for how some of these dinosaurs foraged for food during the polar winter months. It is worth noting that although these dinosaurs lived at polar latitudes, the Cretaceous climate was significantly milder than today, so temperatures within the Antarctic and Arctic Circles were vastly different from the climate at these latitudes today, because the lopsided arrangements of the continents made sea currents and monsoon winds blow across the polar areas and not around them, and so stopped cold pools from developing around the poles. To walk in the footprints of these ancient Victorians, we must first rewind to the late Early Cretaceous period. 115Ma to 120Ma, Australia was situated over the South Pole, her southeast coast joined to Antarctica to form the supercontinent, Gondwana. If climatic conditions then were even remotely similar to Antarctica today, the Gondwanan dinosaurs must have experienced cold winters and months of near-darkness – a challenge not confronted by any known reptile. 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. Their story makes fascinating reading, as does the larger story of the trials and triumphs involved in their discovery. This would be no ordinary dig. The Dinosaur Cove deposit was at the base of a steep, slippery, 90m-cliff, subject to huge tides and extreme weather. Tom’s proposal to have amateurs tunnelling into a vertical cliff with hydraulic drills was met with reactions of horror, but with stubborn persistence, he was able to wade through the mountain of red tape needed to appease the authorities and gather the resources required. With the invaluable support of Bill Loads, manager of Victorian operations for Atlas Copco, who provided the drilling equipment, the stage was set for the commencement of a project that would provide a window into the world of polar dinosaurs. Digging beginsDinosaurs are extinct, but they are still popular among children. They can be seen in books, movies, and TV shows. Few people think about the prehistoric reptiles that roam the earth for millions of years ago. They used to live on every continent but now they only exist in museums and zoos.