Lightning Ridge Dinosaur Fieldwork
📍 Lightning Ridge, NSW
📅 November 2023
Lightning Ridge has been a town of opal mining for decades, and sometimes, the fossils of dinosaurs, marine reptiles, crocodiles, turtles and more also become opalised, the bones or remains turning into amazing colours. Australia is the only place in the world where we have found vertebrate opalised fossils, and Lightning Ridge has a wealth of information hidden beneath the surface.
Working with local miners, the Australian Opal Centre, and a team from the University of New England, headed by Dr. Phil Bell, and myself got to head undergound to search for more dinosaur fossils. The opal-bearing layers are usually between 6-18 metres below the surface, so we descend underground for the week to see what we can find.
Phil and the team have previously found dinosaur remains, including the teeth of the long-necked sauropods, and a new species of ornithopod called Fostoria - named after R. Foster - the owner of the mine where the species was discovered!
While we may create ‘jackets’ or protective coverings over any larger fossil pieces we find, all of the clay and dirt we excavate is hauled out of the mine, and put into a converted cement mixer known as an ‘aggitator’ - this washing process helps to remove the dirt from the opal, and in our case, help to see any small fossils we may have missed.
The dinosaur Fostoria, discovered at Lightning Ridge. Image credit: James Kuether
Image credit: Robert A. Smith/Australian Opal Centre
