Dinosaur Cove

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During the Cretaceous the site (red boxes) was well within the Antarctic Circle

Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, Australia is a major fossil bearing site in south-east of the continent where the Otway Ranges meet the sea to the west of Cape Otway, adjacent to Great Otway National Park (map). The inaccessible ocean-front cliffs include fossil-bearing strata that date back to about 106 million years ago (MYA).

During the Early Cretaceous the location was a flood plain within a great river valley that formed as Australia started to separate northward from Antarctica. Sand, mud and silt deposits covered and sometimes preserved the remains of dead animals and plants. As the rift valley sank, the deposits were buried by up to three kilometres of sediment, which turned to rock under pressure. In the last 30 million years the sediments have been uplifted to form the Otway and Strzeleki ranges, bringing them near the surface again.

In a geologically similar location in Victoria, the first dinosaur fossil ever discovered in Australia was uncovered in 1963, when the geologist William Hamilton Ferguson was mapping the rocky coastal outcrops.

The exploration of the Dinosaur Cove site was helped tremendously by the tireless efforts of Thomas H. Rich and Patricia Rich. The dinosaurs, Leaellynasaura amicagraphica and Timimus hermani, are even named after their children Tim and Leaellyn.

Heavy mining equipment and dynamite was needed to blast away overlying strata to uncover the fossiliferous rock layers in the cliff face.

In the 1980s and 90s Dinosaur Cove yielded such hypsilophodontids as Leaellynasaura amicagraphica and Atlascopcosaurus loadsi, and a Coelurosaur, as well as fragments of what may be a caenagnathid (relatives of the Oviraptors). These Australian species, the "polar dinosaurs of Australia", apparently had keen night vision and might have been warm-blooded, letting them forage for food during long polar winter nights at low temperatures, which were much milder than today's temperatures within the Antarctic Circle.