There was no drum roll, no fanfare the day Doug Langdon made one of Australian palaeontology's most important discoveries. He was on horseback, mustering cattle as he often did for his family's butchery in the central-western Queensland town of Muttaburra. He'd ridden across that paddock countless times before. The property's owners must also have crossed this spot often as it was close to one of their favourite swimming holes on a channel of the Thomson River.
But, as Langdon recalled the 1963 event, on this occasion, the assortment of rocks that previously must have been dismissed as piles of what the locals call gidyea stone was clearly a skeleton. And from the size of its hip bone, Langdon knew he had stumbled across “something big”.
Big indeed. What he had found was the first, and still most complete, fossilised skeleton of the ornithopod dinosaur now known as Muttaburrasaurus langdoni. The massive — more than seven metres long
