This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
Site-level location · 20.7317° S, 143.1437° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
An eleven-metre life-size Kronosaurus outside a museum in a town that used to be at the bottom of a sea.
Kronosaurus Korner at Richmond in north-west Queensland is one of the principal stops on the state's Dinosaur Trail, and RACQ records an eleven-metre life-size replica of Kronosaurus queenslandicus outside the museum.
The animal was real and enormous. Kronosaurus was a pliosaur – a short-necked marine reptile with a skull well over two metres long and teeth to match – that hunted the shallow inland sea covering much of Queensland around 110 million years ago. It is the apex predator of that vanished ocean, and the species name records where it was found.
Richmond's fossil record is exceptional. The museum is best known for its marine fossil discoveries, including Krono, a ten-metre marine reptile, and Wanda, described as Australia's largest fossilised specimen of its kind. This is not a town that borrowed a dinosaur; it is a town sitting on the seabed that produced them.
Life-size rather than exaggerated is the correct decision, and it is a decision this catalogue has seen before with Dave the elasmosaur at Chillagoe and Kenny the diprotodon at Eulo. When the real animal is already astonishing, accuracy beats scale.
Richmond sits on the Flinders Highway between Hughenden and Julia Creek, in the same fossil country that gives Hughenden its Muttaburrasaurus and its windmill-part ammonite.
The hand behind it and a date did not survive into any source.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
