ABC Now - Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide

This is a fascinating program about Australia's ancient geological history. Using palaeontological information it travels all over Australia exploring the history of the earth through the evolution of the Australian continent.

Of all continents on Earth, none preserve the story of the formation of our planet and the evolution of life quite like Australia. Nowhere else can you simply jump in a car and travel back through the entire history of the world.

Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide takes you on a rollicking adventure from the birth of the Earth to the emergence of the world we know today. Buckle up for a rocky ride down the Road of Time with series host Dr Richard Smith. Over four one-hour episodes, we meet titanic dinosaurs and giant kangaroos, sea monsters and prehistoric crustaceans, disappearing mountains and exploding asteroids.

I think I'm going to have to buy it. I missed last week's program and my ABC reception (along with my channel 7 reception, all channels owned by them), is very bad and sometimes not watchable.

When I see programs like this I am very sad that my father isn't here to see them. He would be delighted with the information packed into the program. He collected fossils and had trilobites and crinoids and other Australian fossils which he had collected over time. I'm pretty sure they're still at home in the drawers under the little telephone table where they've lived for over 40 years!

Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide.

A bonus, if you search for the name of the program you will find links to creationists' blog/s, which make for fascinating reading as they try to debunk the fossil evidence and tell us you can only know something really happened if there were witnesses, so all this program is a myth.

New dinosaurs discovered in Australia

There have been some amazing paeleontological discoveries recently in Australia. These dinosaurs are the most complete skeletons found in Australia.

CANBERRA, Australia — It was a 1,100 pound meat-eating predator with three slashing claws on each of its powerful forelimbs that stalked the Outback 98 million years ago.

Scientists have now confirmed for the first time that the big, fast dinosaur lived in Australia - and they've named it like something from an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Meet the Australovenator.

The beast was a 1,100 pound meat-eating predator with three slashing claws on each of its powerful forelimbs that stalked the Outback 98 million years ago, researchers said in a report published Friday.

What idiot thought up that stupid, stupid name? Australovenator?

Can I just correct a something in the report?

The finders nicknamed the 16-foot long carnivore, Australovenator wintonensis, "Banjo," after the poet A.B. "Banjo" Paterson who in 1885 penned Australia's unofficial anthem "Waltzing Matilda" on a sheep ranch near Winton — a cattle town that lies closest to where the dinosaur bones were found. Banjo's Latin name means "Winton's Southern Hunter."

In Australia we don't have "ranches", they're called Stations, it's a Sheep Station. Read more here.

I've been to Winton in Qld, the ex was born there and we had a trip there in about 1994 via many other interesting towns and sights on our way to the sister in law's wedding in Townsville. We also visited the Venus Battery, a gold mine in Charters Towers. I quite liked Charters Towers.

Unfortunately we didn't get to see the site of the plane crash (QANTAS, 03 Oct 1934, near Winton, Australia, de Havilland DH-50A) near Winton, nor did we see the birthplace of QANTAS*, and we didn't get to Lark Quarry, it was a side trip we didn't have time for. Lark Quarry is where a lakeside has been fossilised and you can still see the footprints of the animals which came to drink and walked across the mud flat.

About/Where Is Winton, Queensland? Don't bother with the pictures, they're woeful after the statue and windmill.

Many years ago, as a young teenager, I visited a place called Chillagoe in North Queensland. There are caves at Chillagoe, both limestone and closeby** there are lava tubes (Undara Lava Tubes, I have never been there but I would love to look - though I have been to Hawaii in 1991). In Chillagoe the family and others were caving, mapping caves, searching for new caves, and on one trip there a few paeleontologically inclined speleologists recovered a rare fossilised crocodile skull from Fossil Cave. A stinking, hot, humid, horrible close-to-the-surface tunnel reached from a small hole in the ground. (Memory's not fantastic, I was only 13 and it was 37 years ago.)

*Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service (Qantas) was formed in Winton in November 1920 and its first board meeting held in the Winton Club on February 21, 1921.

** closeby in this case is within a day's drive.