MysteriousAustralia

[javajimi]

Excerpts from "Mysterious Australia. (c) Rex Gilroy. All rghts Reserved.

javajimi: Rex has this saying-"Either science has to take the age of man back to the age of the Dinosaurs-or else, science must bring the demise of the Dinosaur forward to the age of humans; they won't even consider either idea.

Paranormal And Psychic Australian Magazine 1970's
Editor Don Boyd



Dinosaurs from the Dreamtime-By Rex Gilroy

A hunting party of fur-clad cavemen, spears in hand, lie crouched behind rocks on a rugged moutainside. They are watching the enormous greyish, horny- armour-plated lizard-like creature only metres in front of them.

Having circled around their prey, a signal is given and the hunters suddenly spring from their cover. With cries, they hurl their spears at the reptile. Giving a fearsome hiss at its tormentors, the monster begins to defend itself.

Swinging its thorny tail, it hurls one hunter to the ground. Others are almost trampled by the beast as it moves forward to escape its attackers.

One warrior rushes at the beast, thrusting his spear at its neck; another hurls his spear into an eye. With a hissing gasp, the beast crumples agonisingly to the ground. The warriors triumphantly rush the lifeless beast whose meat will now serve the food needs of the hunters' tribe.

Fantastic, you say? Something out of a late-night horror movie on television? Perhaps not, if certain Aboriginal traditions about to be studied have any credence.

According to the geological and fossil evidence, dinosaurs lived during the Mesozoic era, which is divided up into the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, a time-span from 245 to 66.4 million years ago when it is said they became extinct. Their demise is a subject hotly debated by palaeontologists.

Certainly, it was no 'overnight' event, and changing environmental conditions had much to do with their disappearance-that is, unless some isolated populations lingered on in remote, out-of-the-way parts of the world such as Australia where ideal environmental conditions still favoured their survival.

Dinosaurs have always been a favourite research subject of mine (an interest that began when I was just seven years old) and there can be nothing more exciting than taking part in the search for fossil remains of these fantastic reptiles. In the course of many years I have searched the continent for their fossil bones and footprints.

My first real evidence of Australian dinosaurs came from the Blue Mountains in the 1960s and 1970s when I recovered two small fossil skulls as well as a number of small and large fossilised tracks.

In one of our latest dinosaur fossil-hunting expeditions to central Queensland in July 1992, my wife Heather and I, investigating a field of Cretaceous mudstone west of Hughenden, stumbled upon an enormous mudstone slab containing a number of large tracks.

Nearby, embedded in hard ground, I discovered a large slab of mudstone, fragmented through weathering, upon which was the incomplete imprint (heel missing) of an enormous reptilian foot: three large toes measuring 30 centimetres in length by 40 centimetres width.

The track is similar to another from the same region displayed in the Brisbane Museum, thought to be that of a muttaburrasaurus, an ornithopod dinosaur (i.e., bird-footed) that stood up to 7.3 metres with a mass of 3.5 tonnes. These reptiles roamed the central Queensland swamplands in early Cretaceous times, around 100 to 110 million years ago.
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The Story Of Life is Quicker than the Wink of an Eye. The Story of Love is Hello Goodbye-Until We Meet Again

[javajimi]

Excerpts from "Mysterious Australia. (c) Rex Gilroy. All rghts Reserved.

javajimi: Rex has this saying-"Either science has to take the age of man back to the age of the Dinosaurs-or else, science must bring the demise of the Dinosaur forward to the age of humans; they won't even consider either idea.

Paranormal And Psychic Australian Magazine 1970's
Editor Don Boyd

Dinosaurs from the Dreamtime-By Rex Gilroy

Paranormal And Psychic Australian Magazine 1970's
By Don Boyd

Dinosaurs from the Dreamtime

Undoubtedly the most famous dinosaur fossil tracks so far uncovered in Queensland are to be found at Lark Quarry, 120 kilometres south-west of Winton in central Queensland.

These consist of over 3,500 footprints of small-to medium-sized dinosaurs and two much larger species, all preserved on the same layer of rock. The tracks are of at least 150 individuals, almost all running at full speed in one direction to the north-east.

Of these, several kinds of bipedal dinosaurs have been identified. They include (a) coelurosaurus, which was a small meat-eating saurischian (reptile-hipped) dinosaur resembling hypsilophodon, and which stood 13 to 22 cm high at the hip; (b) ornithopod, which was a small-to medium-sized ornithischian (bird-hipped) dinosaur resembling hypsilophodon, 14 to 158 cm high at the hip; and (c) theropod, a large meat-eating saurischian dinosaur standing 2.6 metres high at the hip, about the same size as an allosaurus.

These tracks tell a fascinating story. What happened? The large meateating dinosaur apparently cornered and startled the coelurosaurs and omithopods who fled in panic.

How fast did they run? The evidence is that the coelurosaurs were running fast to the north-east at about 12 kilometres an hour, while the ornithopods were running in the same direction at about 16 km an hour. The theropod was walking quite slowly in the opposite direction (to the south-west) at about 7 km an hour. So it appears that the whole event was over in a few minutes.

But these are tracks from geological times. What of the mystery giantsized reptilian tracks, many of which are bipedal, that have been claimed found in remote parts of Australia's far north over the years?

If these tracks are authentic they certainly support the ancient Aboriginal traditions, now to be examined, which suggest that some dinosaurs, or reptiles very much like them, were present in ice-age Australia. I prefer to keep an open mind on the following startling proposition, and leave readers to judge.

Yet, whatever my readers' conclusions, the mystery remains-namely, how did the ancient Aboriginal people know of gigantic reptilian beasts whose modern-day descriptions are known only from scientific textbooks?

According to the folklore of the former tribes of the area around Lake Alexandrina, South Australia, back in the Dreamtime there once lived a giant reptilian beast which was taller than the trees and which was killed with a spear by a great hunter named Wyungare.

The monster was said to have moved quickly upon its hind legs on feet possessing great claws, though its two front legs were too small to be useful. It had a fearsome head with sharp teeth. It is debatable whether the mysterious monster was a creature similar to the tyrannosaurus or whether the Aborigines confused some reptile with the giant kangaroos of Pleistocene times.

However, there was something even more remarkable about the description of "Kulta". According to central Australian Aboriginal folklore, Kulta was a giant serpent that lived in the swamps and watercourses of the far north when all the land of that part of Australia was a lush jungle- and swamp-covered region.

Kulta was said to have a small head at the end of a long narrow neck, attached to an enormously bulky body supported by four great legs. He moved about the swamps and landscape trailing a long, pointed tail behind him. Kulta was so long that if he were to enter a forest, his head would protrude from one end and his tail from the other. Kulta's food, so the legends said, consisted of plant life in the forests and swamps.

All the natives feared Kulta whom they regarded with great awe. Whenever Kulta moved about the countryside, the ground shook with his tremendous weight. Unfortunately there came a time when all the land dried up, the forests turned to desert, the swamps emptied, and Kulta died.

If the appearance of Kulta as described in the ancient folklore of the central Australian tribes is correct, then Kulta could best be described as a member of the sauropod family of dinosaurs which contained some of the best-known species such as the brontosaurus, diplodocus, camerosaurus, austrosaurus, rhoetosaurus and others.
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The Story Of Life is Quicker than the Wink of an Eye. The Story of Love is Hello Goodbye-Until We Meet Again