- Australia has become a new hot spot for paleontologists to dig for dinosaurs, the NYT reported.
- It all started in the early 2000s when a farmer found a dinosaur graveyard 5 feet under his land.
The paleontological equivalent of a gold rush is happening in an unexpected place: Australia. Before the turn of the century, Australia was not a place you went digging for dinosaurs.
That all changed, however, when Australian farmer David Elliott, invited some scientists onto his land in the early 2000s to explore what he thought was a dinosaur graveyard, The New York Times reported.
Elliott was raised on the farmland which had belonged to his father before him. And both he and his father had found dozens of small fragmented fossils near the surface over many years, per NYT.
It wasn't until Elliott and his invited guests dug deeper that they discovered something unprecedented. "About five feet down, the earth was teeming with chunks of bone," NYT reported.
Only half a dozen dinosaurs have been discovered in Australia compared to the 81 that have turned up in the US. Australia just wasn't a place where paleontologists expected to find entire fossils intact.
All it took was digging a little deeper and "you transition from not finding anything to finding everything," Scott Hocknull, a paleontologist at the Queensland Museum in Australia who was with Elliott on that fateful dig, told the NYT.
Since the early 2000s, paleontologists have gone on to make even more grand discoveries.
Earlier this year, scientists excavated a near-complete skull of a long-necked dinosaur species called sauropods. And in 2021, paleontologists reported that fossilized bones, initially mistaken for a pile of rocks, belonged to one of the largest dinosaur species ever found on Earth.
Now, paleontologists native to Australia who had left to pursue their careers in more dinosaur-rich regions are returning home, sparking a new-found surge in paleontology for the country, according to the NYT.
As for Elliott, he uncovered so many dinosaur bones that he set up his own museum called the Australian Age of Dinosaurs, which attracted 60,000 visitors in 2021, according to the NYT.