Sunset over Baldy Top lookout and the vast mulgastudded plains beyond Quilpie.
ESCAPE ROUTES
Eromanga Natural History Museum
the golden hour on dunes near Toogunna Plains.
artesian bathhouses at Yowah
Corey Richards is dwarfed by Cooper's skeleton
Corey Richards is of average height, but he stands way below knee height beside the replica skeleton of the remains of Australia's largest dinosaur, Australotitan cooperensis.
As the operations manager of the Eromanga Natural History Museum, Corey explains that when this giant grass-eating sauropod nicknamed Cooper roamed what is now the Channel Country of south-western Queensland in the mid-Cretaceous period some 95 to 98 million years ago, he was the third-largest creature on Earth (Patagotitan and Argentinosaurus from present-day South America just pipped him to top billing).
Weighing about 67 tonnes and measuring 30 metres long, Cooper and his slightly smaller distant relative, Zac, who is remarkable because he was an articulated fossil (his bones were found in anatomical order), were both discovered on Plevna Downs, an hour to the west of Eromanga. Fourteen-year-old Sandy Mackenzie was riding a bike across the paddocks in 2004 when he noticed an “unusual rock” on the ground. “His parents, Robyn and Stuart, brought it with them for identification when they took Sandy back to boarding school,” Corey explains. “They became the driving force behind the museum, and still host twice-yearly digs on