A three-course food web from the Cretaceous seas of Queensland: a Platypterygius australis ichthyosaur that had been snacking on fish, cephalopods and pterosaurs — before it, in turn, got chewed on by a Kronosaurus queenslandicus. Travis and Alyssa dig into what the bite marks and gut contents tell us about who was eating whom in ancient inland Australia.
Then, Travis heads out to Gold Creek to sit down with Shannon Bourke, education and outreach coordinator at the National Dinosaur Museum in Canberra, for a tour through animatronic accuracy (and inaccuracy), seasonally repainted triceratops, and how a small private museum can uietly launch palaeontology careers.
To close out: a preview of The End of Oak Street — dinosaurs, suburbia, Ewan McGregor punching things — and the story of the one Chase question Travis really should have known.
Paper discussed: White, M. et al., “Beneath the Waves: Extraordinary Dietary Insights from a Dismembered Ichthyosaur from the Lower Cretaceous,” Gondwana Research.
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Alyssa Fjeld (00:08)
Welcome back to Fossils in Fiction. We’re here on another vaguely sunny Melbourne day to bring you some interesting dinosaur related content. Travis, how are you doing today?
Travis Holland (00:19)
Yeah, pretty well, Alyssa. We’ve got for this episode to talk about an interview that I conducted with Shannon at the National Dinosaur Museum here in Canberra. we’re gonna talk about a fantastic paper with a really cool specimen that’s come out of Queensland. And briefly we’re gonna preview the end of Oak Street. So the new Dino film. Good to see more dino media out there. So yeah, this should be a fun episode.
Alyssa Fjeld (00:47)
I’m looking forward to it. Yeah, there’s been a resurgence in dinosaurs in media lately. I know we’ve also seen them in Star Trek Strange New World season four premiere. I’ve not personally seen that yet. I’m still one season behind on Star Trek, but I did hear that episode had puppets, so you know, I’m always here to see dinosaurs, especially if they are played by puppets. Especially if those puppets are damp. A damp dinosaur puppet is peak.
Travis Holland (01:10)
I’m always excited for new for new dinosaur media as well. But that excitement got tempered a little bit when when Sixty Five came out because that was just a terrible movie.
Alyssa Fjeld (01:21)
Yes,
I remember Jake Kotevski and I and another colleague Ruraidh Duncan. We were all flying to Paleo Down Under 3, and Jake was sat next to me watching that film on the airplane flight from Melbourne
Travis Holland (01:33)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa Fjeld (01:33)
to Perth. And I don’t need to see that movie because I’ve just seen Jake’s commentary, which largely consisted of him going, no. What? no, we can’t no
Travis Holland (01:45)
I went to the cinema to watch sixty five, and I you know, I mean, look, it’s prehistoric jungles with things vaguely resembling dinosaurs running around attacking humans. So, you know, that kinda works. Like, from from
Alyssa Fjeld (01:59)
Yeah.
Travis Holland (02:00)
just about any angle that kinda works. But I couldn’t believe how bad it was and how bad the plot
Alyssa Fjeld (02:05)
Yeah.
Travis Holland (02:06)
was and
It was so bad that I went back and saw it again about a week later just to confirm that it was as bad as I thought it was the first time.
Alyssa Fjeld (02:16)
I gave them money
twice just to confirm it was that bad.
Travis Holland (02:20)
Exactly.
Anyway, I’m hoping End of Oak Street shouldn’t be that bad. I’ve seen a couple of gripes out there about it, but ultimately I think people think it’s pretty okay and it’s got a pretty stacked cast, so we’ll get onto that, but let’s let’s have a look at this Cretaceous Turducken from Queensland.
Alyssa Fjeld (02:37)
this was a publication coming out of Richmond here in Australia talking about fossil evidence for an animal eating another animal and then a third animal eating the animal that ate the first animal. So a true natural turducken if you will
Travis Holland (02:52)
We we just have to get you know, our own our own turducken thing in there, which i if of course is a is an American gastronomic marvel,
the paper is called Beneath the Waves: Extraordinary Dietary Insights from a Dismembered Ichthyosaur from the Lower Cretaceous. So that is a really descriptive title, which I absolutely love as well. Sometimes palaeo titles are quite dry. whereas
Alyssa Fjeld (03:14)
Mm.
Travis Holland (03:15)
in my field of media studies, we like to make puns and jokes in just about
Alyssa Fjeld (03:18)
Yeah.
Travis Holland (03:19)
every title. Like it’s it’s almost compulsory. But
Alyssa Fjeld (03:22)
as one should.
Travis Holland (03:24)
Yeah,
exactly. But that that’s a really that’s a really nice descriptive title.
what they discovered here in Richmond in Queensland was a dismembered adult ichthyosaur. the species is Platypterygius Australis. So it’s about a six to seven meter
Ichthyosaur. Now these are the the dolphin-like, and when I say dolphin-like, they’re convergent with dolphins, convergently evolved with dolphins to to have that kind of shape on their bodies. Now the Platypterygius had gut contents which illustrate what it was eating, and those gut contents consisted of I mentioned before fish, but also cephalopods and pterosaur bones.
So it evidences that it was eating pterosaurs as well as the fish and the cephalopods in in the gut contents. But then the Platypterygius skeleton had been chewed on by probably a pliosaur Kronosaurus queenslandicus. So this is one of those very large ocean-based predators that had chewed on this. So we have two two marine reptiles having
Alyssa Fjeld (04:26)
Yes.
Travis Holland (04:26)
chewed on.
one of them having chewed on a fish and a pterosaur and one of them having chewed on the other one. So effectively the
Alyssa Fjeld (04:33)
Right. Okay.
Travis Holland (04:34)
it’s it’s a it’s a picture of a whole food web, which is really, really cool, I think. And it also shows you know, the pterosaur being involved in the marine feeding environment as well. So it’s evidence that the pterosaurs were in and around the ocean, the the Cretaceous ocean of inland Australia, which is fantastic.
because it just lends weight to what we had previously seen of of some of these pterosaurs in that region. but yeah, it’s it’s really cool that you get to see so many interactions and food as I say food webs or or f trophic interactions as w as they might say in the actual in the actual literature amongst these creatures, which I think is really, really fantastic.
Alyssa Fjeld (05:16)
Yeah, and it’s it’s something that I think we’re getting more and more of as the field of science and paleontology progresses is better understandings of not just the bones that we’re getting out, but what’s contained in the impressions and the sediment around these bones. if you read the paper, which both of us have done, I think most of our listeners should be able to get at least some of the like
casually science communicated things, they might not have these diagrams in them, but one of the reasons that they were able to make these determinations is because so many of these bones were still in the sediments, which meant that they were better able to say, okay, this is definitely within this animal’s stomach contents. this is the kind of sediment distributions and disturbances that we see. And think.
it’s probably something we’ll see more and more of coming out of Australian paleontology because so often we are forced to work with such fragmentary material that we we do these very in-depth kind of analyses of what we find in terms of bite marks, in terms of damage to the bones. and I I think it’s really exciting to see some of the art fan art people have come up with for this as well. Like there’s a lot of illustrations of that food web you’re talking about where like
You got the little fish, and then you’ve got the ichthyosaur, the kind of dolphin with giant eyeball, and then the Kronosaurus which is like a little bit of like Lapras hungered for blood.
Travis Holland (06:32)
I could
see I could see Lapras. I just want I wanna reimagined Lapras now the Pokemon, for those playing along at home as as
Alyssa Fjeld (06:39)
No.
Travis Holland (06:40)
a yeah, a very hungry pliosaur.
Alyssa Fjeld (06:43)
Yeah,
it just opens its cute little mouth and it’s all teeth.
Travis Holland (06:47)
Yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (06:49)
which, you know, if our visit or if anybody listening along at home is thinking about visiting Kronosaurus Korner the art is getting a huge update at Kronosaurus Korner very soon. friend of the channel, Zev Landes and a couple of other artists have been working really hard on that. So if you like seeing Predatory Lapras, there’s another opportunity for you to do that very soon.
Travis Holland (07:07)
I think we’re gonna have to talk to Zev about doing some artwork that that is predatory lap lapras specifically. yeah, that would be fantastic. So yeah. Yeah, we just need
Alyssa Fjeld (07:12)
Absolutely. Yeah. Eating our two little guys. Australovenator eating the Trilobite, Lapras eating the Australovenator
Travis Holland (07:21)
to throw Australovenator in there as well, absolutely, to give the whole the whole Yeah. Up and down the board.
Alyssa Fjeld (07:25)
have authenticity. You know, King
Cambrian trilobite, Cretaceous Dinosaur, Cretaceous Pliosaur, Pliasaur. Pliosaur people don’t at me.
Travis Holland (07:40)
we will share this paper in the show notes, but it was in publishing Gondwana research. Matt White was the lead author. Kevin Peterson’s another author. He’s the former the former
curator of the museum Chronosaurus Corner there in Richmond. and also Macca, Maca Eichelmeyer, who was on the show a couple of episodes back from Winton.
Alyssa Fjeld (08:01)
Yes.
Travis Holland (08:02)
She’s also named as one of the authors on there. So so well done to Macca, Matt, Kevin, and the other co-authors, which also include Peter Trusler who is the artist
Alyssa Fjeld (08:09)
Peter Trussler. Yeah.
Travis Holland (08:11)
as well, and Joseph John Bevitt So yeah, really, really cool research. It points to as well, I think, something that we
We have been saying for a while that a few others are saying
Australia is still a pretty underdeveloped place for palaeontology in that its its representation in the global fossil record is still pretty poor compared to other very well-studied con studied continents and particularly other well-studied Western continents. And so it’s really interesting to see all of these studies starting to come out of Australia and getting this kind of our own golden age of of paleontology or of paleontological representation.
Renaissance, the dinosaur renaissance of Australia happening here. I think it’s pretty, pretty cool to see all these things happening, so.
Alyssa Fjeld (08:57)
And speaking of dinosaur renaissance, you recently paid a visit to perhaps a lesser known museum of Australia’s. now that you’ve relocated to Canberra, you were able to visit a fantabulous institution down there. Why don’t you tell us more about that?
Travis Holland (09:11)
Yes, so the National Dinosaur Museum here in Canberra has a really interesting kind of history. It’s
When you hear the terms National Dinosaur Museum in Canberra, which is Australia’s capital, you would presume that this is a kind of big sandstone building with, you know, research focused and paleontologists going everywhere. It’s not that. I’ll be really honest
Alyssa Fjeld (09:32)
Mm-hmm.
Travis Holland (09:33)
and upfront and say it’s not that. It’s a small private museum. They do conduct some research, but primarily their interest is in education and inspiration, and being a private museum.
one of their major drivers is sales and the the shop we’re still gonna talk a little bit about that with with the guest but yeah primarily their their main job here in Canberra is to communicate with school kids they’re very family focused about dinosaur and paleontological science and get people inspired and interested and so in that regard more than most museums they focus on models animatronics
and artwork. but that’s really great. We we talk about that.
I took a visit there a couple of months ago, just after I moved to Canberra, and then I’ve gone back in the last couple of weeks and sat down with Shannon, who is their outreach and education coordinator, a young guy, really enthusiastic. And and there’s part of this conversation where we go into Shannon’s background and I ask him, you know, how he got involved and how he started working at the museum or where he wants to take it in his life. And it pointed out to me the role that these kind of institutions can have for somebody who doesn’t have the pre-existing
connections who
Alyssa Fjeld (10:45)
Yeah.
Travis Holland (10:45)
maybe doesn’t even have an opportunity to get the formal education because there’s still only a handful of universities in Australia that do paleontology education and degrees. And so if you are not in a position to attend one of those, then you could find yourself locked out of those opportunities. But
Shannon’s story really shows how even a museum like this, which is maybe off the beaten path in terms of what we might typically talk about as education and and research in the space, can actually really shine a light. And I mentioned to Shannon, but I’ll highlight it again here, a another former guest of the podcast, Sally Hurst is is also an ex-employee there. So she also got her start. And again, you know, I hope Sally doesn’t mind me sharing this. She’s it’s the story she’s recounted on this podcast and elsewhere.
But again, she came from a small country town. Her first kind of exposure, as I understand it, was through this museum. And then she’s gone on to do great things in in paleontology and particularly education and outreach. So yeah, here’s the story of the National Dinosaur Museum as told by their education and outreach manager Shannon.
Travis Holland (11:59)
Shannon, g’day, nice to chat.
Shannon Bourke (12:01)
It’s lovely to see you
Travis Holland (12:02)
Tell us about yourself. What do you do here at the National Dinosaur Museum in Canberra?
Shannon Bourke (12:07)
So I am our head of tour and gallery operations. So my primary job is I make sure all things in the gallery aren’t broken. So I fix our animatronics, I fix our skeletons where possible. I acquire new ones if we need to or replacement parts. But most of my job, 90% of it, is handling tours. So school groups, public groups, our tours that we run during the holidays. I write script, research, train all the guides. I handle all of that side of it mostly, the educational aspects of the museum.
Travis Holland (12:35)
perfect stuff to jump on a podcast and tell us all about. What is the National
Shannon Bourke (12:37)
Yeah.
Travis Holland (12:40)
Dinosaur Museum?
Shannon Bourke (12:41)
So we’re a small privately owned museum out in Gold Creek in Canberra. primarily we’re focused on one prehistoric life, but also we have one of the largest collections of minerals and gemstones as well. In I believe in Canberra, we might be Canberra’s largest collection. Don’t quote me on that. but we focus primarily on tourism. So people who come visit Canberra like say the ski season right now. We have a lot of families rolling through, parents who maybe one parent’s off skiing with the older kids and they bring the littlies to us
Travis Holland (13:08)
it is a private museum. There’s a bit of a difference between what we might what we often think of in Australia as those big national state institutions. So what’s it like being out here and and running or being part of the team that runs a museum like this as a private institution, I guess compared to those big research intensive places?
Shannon Bourke (13:29)
There’s a few things that are really good about being private and a few things that make it a bit harder. We have a lot less red tape when it comes to things like developing our programs and doing our own research and even doing things like what we post on social media. There’s a lot less oversight there. We haven’t got to pass it through government officials or heads of marketing and things like that.
But the trade-off for that is that those bigger museums also have bigger teams. They have bigger funding budgets. They have grants to do their own research. And they have they can hire specialized education officers and things. Whereas our tour guides are expected to be kind of jack of all trades. They have to be retail staff. They have to be able to do guides. Some of them have to do maintenance and garden things. And so we don’t have that quite that
The specialization Yeah, specialisation aspect. We have very much a lot of generalists in the museum.
Travis Holland (14:18)
Like yourself, you you know you said you kind of do a bit of everything around the place, despite what your what your official title is. and you are, as you mentioned, a you know, kid focused, entertainment focused facility. What does some of that involve? Like if somebody’s coming to the front door, what are they going to experience on the day?
Shannon Bourke (14:37)
The first thing that almost everyone sees, and the school kids will happily tell you this, is obviously our gift shop. Again, being privately owned, we are we can have pretty much free reign to put whatever we want in our gift shop. We have an exceptionally large collection of toys and fossils and crystals, and I expect 90% of kids are the most excited by that. Okay. But once they get upstairs to the museum, we have our animatronics, we have our skeletals, we’ve just updated all of our signage to new formats. Those signs are designed so that kids can have a look and see exactly.
how big an animal is, what they look like and where they are. And adults if they want can go on the other side and read all the really complex, scientifically accurate information without having to like have the kids be trawling through that information themselves. So designed to be both easily accessible and also have a lot of information for those who are really curious. Yeah.
Travis Holland (15:26)
Yeah. With those animatronics that you mentioned, you know, they roar and they move and then they’re sitting alongside fossils. How do you see the museum integrating those two different types of display?
Shannon Bourke (15:39)
It’s a very fine line to walk. You can ask any of my guides. Some of them really like the animatronics. They’re really fun. The spectacle is really exciting. Kids love them. On school tours, especially, if we don’t have them on, the kids beg to have them on. They love them. They draw people in. But whenever we have those animatronics, the line that we try to walk is we make sure that all of those animatronics, even if they aren’t the most accurate nowadays, some of them are getting a bit on in age, that the information presented alongside them is as accurate.
As we can make it. All of our signs are updated at least once a year, if not two to three times a year, whenever new information comes out. We’re constantly trawling for it, trying to catch it and put it out as soon as we can. We have our skeletons that sit alongside the animatronics. So it’s very rare that you will see an animatronic in the museum that doesn’t have a fossil or a skeleton or a skull or some sort of replica fossil nearby.
Travis Holland (16:32)
Tell me about the tours that you run. How do they work?
Shannon Bourke (16:36)
There is a lot of work that goes into the back end of those tours. So we have had a base tour for a long time. We’ve been doing tours pretty much since the museum opened in the 1990s. But since then, we are constantly building on and editing. And as we get new displays and new things rolling and new information, for example, the nanotyrannus information that came out last year, wiped out a large chunk of our T. rex information, all of our stuff about T. rex ontogeny, gone. So 90% of my day when I’m not doing stuff up.
The gallery is just spent trawling like Google Scholar, Sci Hub, looking for new papers, new information, making sure the information we do have hasn’t gone out of date. So a lot of it is going back and reading those old papers, our information came from, checking who cited them and whether they’ve been disproven or debunked, or there are people talking about it. Yeah. So it got ear to the ground constantly. It’s hours and hours of research synthesis for maybe this much. You can ask any of my tour guides, the booklet they get when they come is like 40, 50.
50 pages thick of just information about everything in the museum. So they’re not expected to know the whole book back to front. It’s there so that they have their essentials they have to talk about. And if a kid asks them a really insane question, something to do with some really obscure thing. For example, we have a replica fossil animal called Limnoscelis It’s like a small little basal reptilomorph.
If my tour guides didn’t know about that, it’s in the booklet so they can go down and find it after when they need. But it is a lot of effort. It takes hours to train tour guides. It’s a lot of time, a lot of resources. But it does mean that when they get at the back end of that process, our guides are phenomenal. They know everything they need to know. They know exactly how to talk to the kids. They know exactly what targets they need to hit for curriculum-based stuff. So a lot of time is spent to make sure those tours are as good as possible.
Travis Holland (18:25)
That
was going to be my next question actually is about the links to curriculum. So you bring the school groups through. Is it focused on getting kids excited about science or actually teaching them?
Shannon Bourke (18:36)
It’s a bit of both. So dinosaurs have been proven in a lot of studies to be a really good vehicle for teaching kids about lots of the aspects of science education. for example, we’re rolling out a new program right now.
where we’re focusing on going actually into Canberra schools with boxes of real and replica fossils and talking to kids about what paleontology is, what is a fossil, how does paleontology work? And then what does paleontology actually do in your day-to-day life? How does it link into the things that you touch? Yeah. So like paleontologists help find oil, help find coal, they help keep track of past climates and future climate change. And then talk like letting kids know that you don’t necessarily
need to be a hardcore biologist or paleontologist to do paleontology work. Art for example. The kids love hearing that art is really important to paleontology.
Travis Holland (19:23)
Art is, as you say, really important to paleontology. It’s it’s a science that couldn’t exist without art. You know, from the origins of the field, art has been absolutely central to it. That’s what we know, one of the main focuses that we have on this podcast is chatting about the art. So since you mentioned it, tell me about some of the art you’ve you’ve got in and around the museum and the murals and things.
Shannon Bourke (19:46)
Yeah, so a lot
of our murals were actually done quite a long time ago. I recently found we have a really large hand-painted mural of a deinosuchus eating a lembeosaurus upstairs. That was done by an artist called Alan Lamb, who used to work at the museum. That was made in 2004, 2005. So ac about the same it’s about as old as I am now. A lot has changed. Yeah, a lot has changed. But we have both in-house artists who, whenever we need a sketch or a mock-up for say, I need a silhouette for something, they’ll draw me a silhouette. If we need art for promotion,
Things like trading cards or even colouring sheets are all mostly done in-house. Sometimes we do send away. We also buy a fair bit of art. So if we need to display something upstairs and we haven’t got a good piece that we can draw, we might pull from an artist online, we might buy one of their prints or that kind of thing. We try and make sure that all of the art that we produce is as up to date as possible, which means the poor artists spend a lot of time sitting with me talking about all the anatomical things they need to get correct and obviously
With the great dinosaur renaissance, you have lots of really, really thin, shrink wrapped dinosaurs. Some of our old art is has some representations like that. So anything new that we produce, we try and make sure it is as up to date as we can get it within our area of expertise. Yeah,
Travis Holland (21:01)
Fat dinosaurs with feathers.
Shannon Bourke (21:02)
absolutely. Fat dinosaurs because I love me a chunky T. rex. I love a fat hadrosaur. There’s nothing better. But fat, but muscular fat, obviously.
Travis Holland (21:11)
Yeah.
can I talk about the garden for a little bit? Because one one thing that we get at this museum that’s really interesting to me is there’s this sculpture garden outside. I don’t know if that’s the name you use for it, but it is just a space full of dinosaurs in in outdoor in an outdoor sort of naturalistic setting. Some of them chewing on each other and chasing each other, a couple of them chasing jeeps, a la Jurassic Park.
but what what’s the thinking, do you know, with that setup and and how do people react to that space?
Shannon Bourke (21:41)
I think part of it is that getting kids interested in science is good, but the younger kids, particularly kids who are four to six, there’s only so much they can actually absorb through reading and listening to their parents. But if they hear that information, they go outside and they have that tactile play experience, it helps them absorb a bit more of the information. On top of that as well, it’s just a really cool experience to be able to read about a dinosaur upstairs, go out
Side and see it not quite in his natural habitat, but be able to go out and me stand next to a replica model, stand next to something that is as close to life size as you’re going to get, be able to have that more tactile physical experience with the dinosaurs. We find, especially with younger younger school groups, our pre to pre-to roughly year one, that having them go out to the garden helps them actually absorb and internalize all the information more. Play is really important for younger kids learning. I have a bit of a background in psych. I started
did a bit at uni and like through that one of the most important things they they note is that a lot of learning by young kids is done through play through hands-on interaction physical interactive working with the world around them so our garden’s really great for that it’s also just pretty cool like yeah stand out the front obviously our really big T. rex he’s nowhere near accurate he’s way too big for life size but it just looks cool it looks sick
Travis Holland (23:04)
It’s definitely intimidating that T. rex. Speaking of the garden and the art, let’s combine those two. One of the one of the triceratops out the front, am I right that it gets like a a regular paint job?
Shannon Bourke (23:14)
About
this. So we call that that triceratops paintosaurus internally. It gets different names depending on. So we paint that dinosaur seasonally. So we started this last year with Florasaurus for Floriade who will hopefully be making a return again this year. We paint it for Halloween, we paint it for Christmas. We painted it most recently for Pride Month, hence the the rainbow coloration. We also painted it for Easter and things like that. So we that’s one of our dinosaurs that obviously doesn’t have a very accurate coloration, but it’s fun. Kids love it.
love it, it’s really, really it’s a really good photo up as well. Yeah. And it’s just a bit of fun for our staff as well. They get a chance to go out and do a really funny, cool, like fun little paint job on a on a dinosaur.
Travis Holland (23:54)
I saw
it a couple of years ago and I think it had like zebra stripes on there. So it was black and white. That was quite a cool quite a cool design.
it’s the National Dinosaur Museum. It’s based here in Canberra, and specifically it’s at the edge of Canberra, in a in a small suburb called Gold Creek, which itself is a kind of little
attraction based suburb right there’s there’s the reptile museum there’s a few other things around Gold Creek to kind of bring tourists in but what’s it like being out here as opposed to you know at the center of of a capital city or a major city like Sydney or or something like that
Shannon Bourke (24:31)
it means that the museum is kind of split into two two wings. Yeah. So like we have our educational wing. That’s pretty constant throughout the year. Obviously, earlier in the year, term one, you don’t get a whole lot of tours coming through. But Canberra is one of the only places in Australia where almost every school will bring a group of kids at least once every two years. So in that sense, we have a pretty constant flow of of schools coming through. And being as far out as we are, there’s actually a accommodation up the road that does schools. So
They don’t mind school kids coming to us because it’s something they can do at nighttime. We have our night tour programs. There’s very few places actually offer a educational and fun experience after like 5 or 6 p.m. Canberra obviously is a city that goes to bed very, very early most of the time.
Travis Holland (25:17)
Especially in winter.
Shannon Bourke (25:17)
Especially in winter. So the schools love it because it’s something fun, but also they have an educational component to it. The kids do learn things. They learn about science, they learn about dinosaurs, and they also get to explore our museum with some of the lights.
Down and a bit more of a spooky environment. So that’s one half of our operations is getting those education, those tours coming through. The other half is tourism, which obviously it swings and it booms and it busts depending on how well the tourism sector is doing at that time. Things like fuel prices, that kind of thing. We find we get really big influxes during school holidays, particularly in winter, with ski season happening and most people are travelling to Canberra in winter, not many people going out to the beach during the colder periods of the time.
So we find we have really big periods around our school holidays when kids are available and they’re begging their parents to go see dinosaurs. So we have really big periods and we have quiet periods in between where we focus on schools and our day-to-day operations.
Travis Holland (26:12)
Is there anything coming up, anything you want to let us in on that’s you know, a new tour or exhibition or anything little secret that we can
Shannon Bourke (26:20)
We have a few things coming up. We have a very exciting skeletal we’re working on. I can’t leak the species yet, but I believe it is one of two or one of three in Australia when it’s done. Okay. Hopefully, if all goes well, it will be it is a replica skeletal, but it will hopefully be finished and prepped hopefully by next year. So that is in the works and hopefully coming. we are rolling out a new tour program. So speaking as we
were earlier about being in Gold Creek. It’s really hard for Canberra schools to come to us because they would have to get a bus. It’s a long travel for them. So we’re in the middle of rolling out a new program right now. We’re trialing it actually next week of going out to Canberra schools and taking our fossils with us and doing talks inside school grounds so kids don’t have to leave but they can still get that experience of actually being at the museum. So that’s rolling out quite soon hopefully and we have our Floriade programs coming up as well. So this year’s Floriade theme I believe
is f flowers and feast, so it’s focused on how flowering plants help with food production, things like grains and fruits. And we got quite lucky, a new paper came out not that long ago about
they push back large fruits to a little bit earlier in the Cretaceous instead of post-Cretaceous. So we’re doing a talk about how angiosperm’s flowering plants evolved and we have some really cool fossils that haven’t been shown to the public before out of our vault that’ll go come up for those talks and people be having hands-on interacted with them. And lucky last our yearly adults-only Halloween tour should be running again this year, come Halloween time.
Travis Holland (27:53)
Be exciting.
I only live 15 minutes up the road now, so I’ll I’ll be here for that one. we had a chat a couple of months ago, my co-host and I, and we talked about the best dinosaur-inspired food or meals that you could eat. So we’re not talking about triceratops burgers in the in the Floriade feast.
Shannon Bourke (28:10)
No,
unfortunately we don’t we don’t serve any food on site or fortunately for the staff, I don’t think they they would not be happy if I told them we had to start a catering business. But in saying that, we have had some really interesting questions, particularly from kids recently. They’ve been being very curious about how dinosaurs would taste, which is a bit of a tricky question to answer. The consensus seems to be that some dinosaurs may have been more meatier so you might have things that are closer to like game meat, like elk or deer. And the other camp is obviously, well, they probably might taste more like crocodile.
eye or bird and then it’s hard to it’s hard to tell a kid exactly what a T. rex would taste like without tasting it. We can do a bit better with the mammoth obviously they made that big mammoth meatball and carved the chunk out of it. Apparently that wasn’t very good.
Travis Holland (28:52)
Something at the top of the food chain like a T Rex is probably gonna have accumulated heavy metals on it. It wouldn’t actually be that tasty and possibly dangerous.
Shannon Bourke (28:59)
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, it’s like it’s like any sort of prey any sort of predator animal, even like coyote meat I’ve heard tastes horrible and fox and things like that. So we do tell them like it’s probably not gonna taste very good, whatever it is. They’re big and they’re muscler and they’re it’s like eating a big lizard, they’re gonna be pretty tough. Yeah. So
Travis Holland (29:16)
Can I just ask a little bit more about your background? How did you come to be working here?
Shannon Bourke (29:20)
So I moved to Canberra in 2023 for university. I come from a very, very small town. Originally I was studying psych at Uni. Yep. but I’ve always loved dinosaurs since I was a little kid. I adore them. Jurassic Park is my favorite movie, it’s my favorite book. I just love them. But the idea of chasing a career in paleontology for someone like me, I come from a very poor background in a very small town.
I only got to uni because I got a bunch of scholarships. So I was able to c move to Canberra because of that. So the idea of chasing palaeontology which is notoriously not a very high-paying career, was something I just couldn’t fathom. And then I needed a bit of a bit of extra money and I was looking around for part-time jobs. And I happened to stumble across tour guide position here, jumped on it, got it immediately, luckily, and then I’ve been here ever since. I’ve been here since
This time actually it’s probably actually my my aniv my three year anniversary of working here. Yeah. Tomorrow, I think. So I I’ve shot my way up quite quickly. But I started actually out in our garden doing just our garden work and now I moved into tours and now I’m
running our tour segment. But I just love dinosaurs. And now I’m shifting my studies across to to focus more on biology and palaeotonlogy I’m decided I’m gonna chase it even if it’s even if it’s not gonna pay me as well as maybe a side career might have
Travis Holland (30:39)
Well look, if you’re working here, I think it makes sense. I can see the passion and I can see the knowledge coming through, which is which is fantastic. And there are some some you know reasonably well-known paleontologists that have had associations with this museum. One you might know is Sally Hurst who
Shannon Bourke (30:55)
Yes, absolutely.
Travis Holland (30:55)
I’ve interviewed. Sally’s fantastic and she’s out there doing great things. So yeah, I you know, I think even though it’s a a small museum, it’s it’s maybe not a part of those established traditional pathways.
It offers opportunity and it offers inspiration and really that’s what we’re all about. So
Shannon Bourke (31:14)
Yeah,
absolutely. We’ll we’ll get there one day, through through thick or through thin. So
Travis Holland (31:18)
Best of luck, mate. Thanks for having a chat with me on fossils and fiction. Let’s go and check out the dinos, hey.
Shannon Bourke (31:21)
Thank you. Absolutely.
Shannon Bourke (31:24)
This is our Cretaceous room. So obviously, this is the third period our dinosaurs lived in. This is probably the room that our kids find second most exciting after T-Rex. Primarily, that is because of this out here. This is our Carnotaurus. Now, obviously, this model is not a very accurate Carnotaurus. It’s about 10 years old now. Even at the time, it wasn’t phenomenal. The main problems are obviously the head, so the skull shape. Carnotaurus as an Abelisaur has quite a narrow and quite a shallow skull. Ours is a bit too long, not quite as
squished up not quite as pug like the arms are also really actually egregiously bad on this animatronic so carnotaurus arms are supposed to be one single socket they don’t have an elbow they just spin around in the joints they also have four fingers not three but they haven’t got really long claws like this model and the arms themselves are also too big proportionally to the model so real carnotaurus arms are only like 30 centimetres nowhere near as big as this fella’s here he’s way too big but the legs on this model actually are actually weirdly quite correct so carnotaurus
They built like a rugby front rower. They’ve got a lot of muscle in their legs. They used to think top speed was 56 kilometers an hour. I believe there’s been a bit of, as of this year, a little bit of disagreement whether that paper’s still correct. Maybe closer to 40 Ks an hour. So not quite as fast as something as like Struthiumus over there, who’s a bit thinner, a bit more narrow, a bit more streamlined, but still pretty quick for a I think it’s a 1.7 ton animal now. So they’re pushing it. And then Deinosuchus this was the artwork I was.
telling you about. It’s a really, really good piece of art. We actually originally thought that it was a print, but we found the original like documents and the drawings of it in a safe downstairs. So it’s a really phenomenal piece of art our deinosuchus is here. I don’t think it’s considered quite to be that big anymore. I believe they’re a bit smaller than that artwork would tell you now. I think it’s seven meters my own sign will tell me.
Yeah, about ten metres long. There you go. But only about five tons now instead of that eight to nine they were previously. That is definitely an impressive piece of artwork. Yeah, it’s phenomenal. I don’t Alan did it all by hand in 2004, I believe. So he spent hours and hours. He he has a DeviantArt actually now, and on that DeviantArt he has a comment on it saying like he’s not very good at painting, he wasn’t a very good painter. And you look at that and you go, Well, if he’s not a very good painter, what am I? Yeah. So no, it’s such a phenomenal piece of art.
really really good job. A lot of our stuff like this was done by him. He’s got some sketches downstairs that are quite good as well. We have our Ceratopsian skulls as well. Weirdly enough we don’t actually have a trike skull. We have Ankyceratops who is actually a little bit denser than something like a triceratops at least for their size. I believe current theory suggests that possibly they were semi-aquatic. And then Pachy Rhinosaurus who is quite iconic the nasal boss the singular brow horn sorry the two brow horns and the singular horn up the top Pachy Rhino is one of my favorites.
Favorite
ceratopsians. They’re so weird, but I love them dearly. They’re very cool. And our Psittacosaurus So I can’t remember the name of this fossil, it’s escaping me. It’s one of the most famous though, aside from the one that has the fossilized cloaca attached. This is the I believe the one mother and the bunch of small children. Sidicosaurus is a favorite of a couple of our guides. They really like it for some reason.
Fossils and Fiction (34:40)
our rooms are organized by time period, so we start Triassic and move through, except for in this section of the museum here. So we have our marine section back there, and we have our Australia section. The only dinosaur that is not in this room is actually our Kunbarrasaurus who’s all the way back in our Cretaceous. Otherwise, almost all of our Australian dinosaurs are kept in this one room. Now, some of these models were accurate until quite recently. Our Muttaburrasaurus has probably suffered the worst. Again, they found the extra length of snouts, so Muttaburrasaurus’
Nasal snout has moved up. I believe on top of that though they might have actually discovered salinity glands. So they think maybe they were holding salt, suggests maybe more of a semi aquatic diet. And they got way, way bigger recently as well. I think they’re pushing somewhere close to eight tons now at the maximum end. So they’re quite big, quite dense. We have Qantasaurus here who’s missing a few feathers. He’s a little bit too scaly, he’s quite old. But I have a soft spot for Qantasaurus It’s a really, really silly dinosaur name. the only dinosaur I believe in the entire world named after an air.
Company. So very so the kids love him. They also love Leaellynasaura Again, our model is missing the tail feathers that you often have Leaellynasaura depicted with now. Kind of like a Psittacosaurus little feathers on the back. Leaellynasaura sorry, has really cool origin story for the name. Pat and Tom Vickers Rich, their young daughter, begged her parents for a dinosaur for Christmas. Really, really wanted one. Lucky for her, she has maybe the only parents in Australia who could deliver her a dinosaur. I think.
Some sources say that maybe she helped dig it out. I couldn’t verify that, but she definitely was at the dig site the day it was discovered. She got her own dinosaur. Her brother, not to be under outdone, got his own dinosaur, but his is that one singular femur there, Timimus Well, though in saying that Timimus is still cool. At the time it represented the possible, the first possible evidence of a tyrannosauroid.
now knowing that we know about mega raptors, that they are quite possibly tyrannosauroids in and of themselves, it’s possible Timimus represents a femur of a very small megaraptor.
Travis Holland (36:47)
I hope you enjoyed that interview. If you ever get down here to Canberra, I I think it’s well worth spending an hour or two out at the Australian National Dinosaur Museum, out in the Gold Creek village, and there’s lots of other things to do in in Gold Creek as well. So it’s definitely a tourist precinct worth a visit. There’s one thing we didn’t mention in the interview, and I didn’t mention in the lead-up, which is
There’s actually a display there which is really cool and it’s like Othniel Charles Marsh’s camp. So it’s set up to look like
Alyssa Fjeld (37:15)
yeah.
Travis Holland (37:15)
his camp from the Bone Wars era. And there’s a sort of
a frame that’s got a mounted dinosaur hanging on it. and it’s it’s yeah, it’s kind of drawings hung out. So it looks like this kind of old West research camp of OC Marsh. And I’ve never seen anything like that at another museum. So I think it’s actually a really cool addition to that kind of space.
Alyssa Fjeld (37:36)
I mean, we talk all the time about like what well, I should say like when I’ve gone to do outreach at schools, the kids often want to know what the typical day in the life of a paleontologist is like. And I think in the same way that like you’re talking about these museums bringing paleontology to people who may not otherwise have had many opportunities to learn about the realities of the field. you know, when I first got down here, one of the first things I did was go to the museum of South Australia where they’ve got
like a replica of Mawson’s base camp in South
Travis Holland (38:06)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa Fjeld (38:07)
in Antarctica set up. And I had never really thought before about the realities of Antarctic exploration in that time period and how difficult it would have been. And I think, you know, comparing and contrasting the way that field work would have been done in like Othniel Marsh’s time with the way that we would do it today is so interesting to think about.
And and we do actually
Travis Holland (38:28)
Yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (38:29)
have a lot of those scenes kind of immortalized by these drawings that were done by different members of Cope and Marsh’s teams at the time. Like there are actually these like very lovely little watercolors and you know, of them dynamiting the bone beds or whatever.
Travis Holland (38:40)
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean let’s not get into the politics of of the Bone Wars and what was good and bad about that era, but yeah, I I just
Alyssa Fjeld (38:49)
Yeah.
Travis Holland (38:49)
think it’s a really nice immersive little display that they’ve got going on there that kind of shows that history of paleontology, which again you you might not expect walking into that type of museum.
Alyssa, before we move on, I have another story for you. And that
Alyssa Fjeld (39:00)
Yep. Go on.
Travis Holland (39:03)
is that at the end of last year I went on a game show which is I think it runs in the UK and Australia and a bunch of other countries, and it’s called The Chase. So if you know The Chase, what you do is a general knowledge quiz show. each member of the team is given two minutes.
to answer as many questions as they can as a form of cash builder. And after that then they have to face off to the chaser in a kind of head to head battle to to get back to the board and be safe with the cash that they’ve earned. Now
Alyssa Fjeld (39:36)
Okay.
Travis Holland (39:38)
I so I went on the chase. I got ten thousand dollars in the cash builder, which I wasn’t happy with. I wanted I was aiming for sixteen or something. I wanted more than ten.
Alyssa Fjeld (39:46)
Right.
Travis Holland (39:48)
but nonetheless, you know, that that worked. Ten worked. I step up to the board to face the chaser, who was Issa Schultz.
Who’s known as the Super Nerd on the Australian edition of The Chase? And we
Alyssa Fjeld (40:00)
Amazing.
Travis Holland (40:00)
started asking questions. I know it was great. It was like a lot of fun. They started asking questions, and one of the questions was which family of tusked mammals is the stegodon part of. And
Alyssa Fjeld (40:12)
Ho
Travis Holland (40:14)
Yeah, so the Stegodon is a is a past is a paleontology creature. And what I’ve noticed, and I haven’t I haven’t twigged to this before, but what I’ve noticed since
Alyssa Fjeld (40:22)
Hmm.
Travis Holland (40:22)
is if somebody goes in and talks about a special interest of you know, if they have a special interest in their introduction and they talk about it a little bit, there actually does tend to be a question in the chase moment that kind of leans on the special interest. So
Alyssa Fjeld (40:38)
huh.
Travis Holland (40:39)
This is something I as I say, I’ve noticed afterwards, after having been on the show, that there nearly always is a question there that actually in some way relates to the things that they were talking about in the introduction. So I feel like that’s a deliberate strategy that they undertake that produces.
Alyssa Fjeld (40:54)
That’s interesting.
Travis Holland (40:56)
but you know, I don’t have any inside knowledge. It’s just just from my own observations. Anyway, so they asked me this question of stegodon and I thought I have to get this.
Right, as the host of a paleo podcast.
Alyssa Fjeld (41:04)
Yeah. Did you?
Travis Holland (41:07)
But I did not know the answer. I did not know the answer at all. And I was
Alyssa Fjeld (41:10)
I don’t know the answer.
Travis Holland (41:12)
kind of I was running through the logic of is this related to Stegosaurus somehow with the with the stego bit. But I couldn’t
Alyssa Fjeld (41:19)
no Yup.
Travis Holland (41:21)
figure out how exactly. No, I I knew it was a mammal. The answers, the options, the the
Alyssa Fjeld (41:25)
Yeah.
Travis Holland (41:26)
options that they gave me were mammals.
So I knew it was a mammal,
Alyssa Fjeld (41:28)
Right.
Travis Holland (41:29)
I it wasn’t wasn’t a dinosaur, but I was trying to figure out where where did the word Stego, where did that fit into Stegodon and Stegosaurus, and what was the what was the link there? and so what it turns out is I I was kind of right on following that logic, but I was wrong on what the word stego means. So in short, the word stego in Stegosaurus means plate.
Alyssa Fjeld (41:53)
Yes, yes.
Travis Holland (41:53)
And
in stegodon it also means plate, but it refers to plate tooth or flat tooth, and it’s referring
Alyssa Fjeld (42:00)
Ha ha ha.
Travis Holland (42:01)
to the type of teeth that the stegodon has. The stegodon is an elephant, essentially, an ancient elephant. So it has but it has big broad flat teeth. And the others were the others were yes, various other tusks of mammals. So I I
Alyssa Fjeld (42:18)
Yeah.
Travis Holland (42:19)
got the answer right.
I got the answer right. But but my logic was completely wrong and so now I’ll
Alyssa Fjeld (42:20)
Yay. Hey.
Travis Holland (42:25)
always remember what Stego refers to as a result of that.
Alyssa Fjeld (42:28)
Amazing. yeah, and the same thing is true for Stegacanthus, which is that shark that my friend recently pointed out looks like it’s got an AWAX on it, like the anti-aircraft thing they put on airplanes. and in that case,
Travis Holland (42:39)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa Fjeld (42:40)
the Stego is talking about the weird teeth that are on the growth on the back of this shark.
Travis Holland (42:47)
Yeah.
Alyssa Fjeld (42:47)
But I I would not have known Stegodon, because mammals are not my my bag.
Travis Holland (42:53)
No. Another reason to mention
that is that there is a I think it’s a replica, not a real, but there’s a life-size stegodon fossil in the National Dinosaur Museum.
Alyssa Fjeld (43:02)
There you go.
It all came back around in the end. That’s beautiful. well, talking about Marsh’s Camp from before and the need to survive, I I’ll make segues out of anything. we have a new movie that’s come out that to me, I haven’t seen it yet, but to me strikes me as somewhere between like 65 and like The Mist, that Stephen King adaptation.
Travis Holland (43:27)
Mm-hmm.
Alyssa Fjeld (43:29)
can you tell us a little bit about this movie?
Travis Holland (43:32)
So the End of Oak Street. as we say, this is a kind of preview discussion, and I really want to hear from the audience what you think about this film if you’ve gone to see it. And we might do a little bit more of a review. I’m planning to go early next week, so we’ll we’ll have a bit more of a review then after the next episode. But the end of Oak Street, what I like about this, we we talked about having more Dino Media, great. It’s also
proper studio, proper Hollywood studio. So there’s money behind it. I’ve seen some people having gripes, but having money behind Dino Media is also good because it means that they can A take some risks, hopefully, but also produce dinosaurs that look cool.
And I know
there’s a lot of debate out there. You know, there’s some there’s sort of paleo fans who argue about the the specificity and the accuracy of certain types of dinosaurs. I’m not going to get into that. Maybe I’ll get into it now after I’ve actually seen the film. I’ve seen a bit a bit of this debate online.
Alyssa Fjeld (44:28)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Travis Holland (44:29)
But effectively, this is not giving anything away. This is from the trailer. The the end of Oak Street is about a neighborhood called Oak Street.
which is kind of transported one night back to the Cretaceous period, and as a result of that, the the residents of the neighborhood need to survive suddenly with dinosaurs prowling around. It’s got Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor amongst the cast. There’s also a dog called Starbuck, which is kind of a nod to a nod to Moby Dick, I think, which is
that’s where that name came from. So yeah, that it it should it looks like a cool film and I’m really looking forward to seeing it. But seeing how the how the residents survive, who gets killed, who survives, you know, all the good stuff about dinosaurs and humans interacting on screen.
Alyssa Fjeld (45:19)
That’s right.
there and one of the things that I think was also really cool about this movie in the lead up to it, one of the things that makes me a little bit more eager to see it is that when they faced criticism for using generative AI in their advertisements, they did respond by taking those ads down. which to me is i it’s it’s different than if you were to do the whole film in generative AI, which they are not saying they did. but to have put out the advertisement, seen the backlash and gone, you know what?
Maybe not. Maybe this is not what people are interested in. I think that’s a much more interesting way to handle using AI in movies today. and I just want to see Ewan McGregor fight a dinosaur. I’ve always been saying that. I haven’t always been saying that. But like I will now be saying that. I want to see the guy from Trainspotting punch a dinosaur in the face.
you cannot defeat me, Velociraptor. I have the high ground.
Travis Holland (46:08)
Well
Alyssa Fjeld (46:10)
You were the chosen
You were the chosen one.
Travis Holland (46:12)
That’s fantastic. I love it.
Alyssa Fjeld (46:13)
And then it’s just screeching in response,
just you know, as they do. So that’s what the people want to see. Yeah.
Travis Holland (46:18)
Yeah, absolutely. That’s our preview. That’s that that’s
our preview of the End of Oak Street. So yeah, let us know what
Alyssa Fjeld (46:27)
Ha ha ha.
Travis Holland (46:27)
you think and we’ll share some of those comments on the next episode of Fossils and Fiction.
Alyssa Fjeld (46:31)
And instead of just
imagining the movie, you can tell us what we should imagine. No, I’ll go see it too. I’ll go see it too. yeah, thank you guys so much for tuning in. don’t forget to check out our merch. someday if we ever launch a Kickstarter, maybe, you know, we’ll direct our own dinosaur movie. or we’ll finally talk about the Bone Wars. We’ll dig up Othniel Marsh and interview him. That’s what we’ll do.
Travis Holland (46:51)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That
that sounds like a great idea. Let’s exume OC Marsh.
Alyssa Fjeld (46:56)
Yeah,
yeah, it can’t be a crime. I think his brain is like preserved at the Smithsonian or something if the legends are true. So, you know. It’s not even a
Travis Holland (47:03)
Yeah, exactly.
Alyssa Fjeld (47:05)
whole corpse.
Travis Holland (47:07)
Hey look folks,
we’re trying to keep the podcast ad free from now on. If you’d like to help us do that, please consider subscribing, becoming a member of the podcast. It’ll also help us make more episodes and more fun stuff as well. So jump onto our fourthwall store, buy some merch or sign up as a member.
Alyssa Fjeld (47:24)
That’s right. You can get yourself a nice fossils and fiction sticker. it looks just like our logo. It’s bright, it’s vibrant, it’s by a local Melbourne artist. And you can tell your friends that you listen to two very cool nerds describe what they think a movie will be like to you. And also the cool game show they went on, so you know, lots of things going on there. And feel free to drop comments, tell us your thoughts and feelings, dreams and aspirations also welcome. And thank you for joining us. Hopefully we’ll see you in the next one.
