M
ost people dream about discovering ancient
relics or dinosaurs in their backyard. This
became a reality for the Ievers family in
1989 when they stumbled across a 100
million-year-old, near-perfectly preserved
pliosaur (a marine reptile with lippers) in the paddock behind
Marathon Station’s homestead near Richmond in north-west
Queensland.
So it wasn’t too much of a surprise when a couple of months
later they came across what they thought was another marine
monster. They immediately contacted the Queensland Museum,
and a very excited group of palaeontologists made the trek outfrom Brisbane in the scorching summer heat of January 1990.
Dr Ralph Molnar, who was the Museum’s curator, led the
dig. He soon realised that this skeleton wasn’t from an animal
that had lived in the Eromanga Sea – an ancient sea that had
extended over the interior of Queensland – but that of an anky-
losaur that had been washed out from the nearby land.
Ankylosaurs are often referred to as the “armoured tanks”
of dinosaurs. They were herbivorous, rotund creatures with
four stout legs, but their most unique feature was that they
were covered in a diverse array of dermal armour similar to
what we see in crocodiles today. While this armour would have
included ossicles (small pebble-shaped bones), plates and spikes,20 | JUNE 2016
A dinosaur with an
ID crisisLUCY LEAHEYIt’s little wonder that a dinosaur with parrot-like beak, bones in its skin and an inner ear like a
turtle confused the palaeontologists who discovered it in Queensland in 1990.