The first (west) tunnel took a fortnight to complete and was located near the western extreme of Slippery Rock. By the end of the first dig, equal quantities of fossils had been collected at both sites, including several significant dinosaur bones and a tooth.

As the rift valley sank, the deposits were overlaid by sediment, which turned to rock under pressure.Delays in getting an explosives permit and finding suitably qualified shot-firers nearly de-railed the 1987 schedule, but, once again, Tom’s persistence saw approvals given and suitable people recruited. Vandersaurean responsible for the creature and its accidental release, try in desperation to recover it and capture young Riley before the public finds out about their diabolical plans. It was a nail-biting race won with eight minutes to spare, leaving the crew too exhausted to enjoy the beer, which had been waiting on ice all evening. The ‘Friends’ were hell-bent on holding a dinosaur dig and eventually convinced Tom to take them to an enticing deposit on the Otway Coast, an hour and a half’s drive west of Melbourne.

This tunnel site was named Dinosaur Cove East when Pat Vickers-Rich found a second, more exposed site, to the west of the entrance. Dinosaur Cove is a 2022 family adventure film about a boy who discovers dinosaur eggs and must protect them from a crazy scientist.By the close of the 1986 dig, three times as many bones had been found as the previous year, with two-thirds of them from the new ‘Slippery Rock’ site. To walk in the footprints of these ancient Victorians, we must first rewind to the late Early Cretaceous period. There used to be lots of different types of dinosaurs, but today there are only 3 types left: the velociraptor, the pteranodon and the tyrannosaurus rex. Therefore, Tom’s promise of a cubic metre of chocolate to the first person to find a mammal bone must have been an irresistible incentive. This was the decade that brought to the world the fascinating polar dinosaurs of south-eastern Australia and the eventual naming of three new dinosaur species – with a few other surprises along the way.

They lived millions of years ago, which means they were here before people, insects, and even flowers. However, although the Dinosaur Cove era is over, Australia’s polar dinosaur story is far from complete and continues to this day at more accessible sites closer to Melbourne. The site had been discovered in 1980 by Monash University student, Tim Flannery, and faculty member of the University of New South Wales, Mike Archer, while out fossicking with the Rich family.Over geological time since, the rock was pushed so deep that heat and pressure hardened it much, before it came again to the surface. Helen Wilson says people’s reactions to the living conditions ranged from “indifference to complaining to shock and hysteria”. As so often happens in life, a chain of random events brought Tom and Pat on a collision course with Dinosaur Cove.

Tom Rich cringed – if getting the official nod to jackhammer had been difficult, what would the authorities say about dynamite?Subsequent scientific analysis of the fossil material, by a range of scientists including geochemists, palaeobotanists, palaeontologists and geologists, soon revealed more unusual and exciting information. Riley Harrison is a young boy who stumbled across the unlikely discovery of dinosaur eggs near his grandfather’s oceanfront home. An enormous storage shed had been constructed to protect caravans and gear from corrosion, a platform-scaffold had been erected over the Slippery Rock entrance and redundant tunnels had been fitted out with shelving.