Oh, what fun!! We had the chance to pretend to be paeleantologists today. The Mt Etna dig site was opened to the public, so we went along to get our hands dirty. We didn't exactly find any new species of dinosaurs, but we did get to bring a few fossils home... more about that later.

This is the lovely lady as we drove up. It never ceases to amaze me, this place.





"I wonder if there'll be many other people here," we wondered.... Holy Shite!!





There were piles of excavated rock and dirt waiting for the public to sift through. We didn't get to go through the good stuff though... unfortunately. Lines of people were waiting to have a dig. I don't think even the organisers had any idea how popular this day was going to be. Each group had 15 minutes in which to stake out a claim and sift through the dirt.





Heads down, bum up... how much fun is this?





We wandered around for a bit and had a bit of a sticky-beak. There were rocks everywhere! Piles and piles of it.





This is a large piece of crystal I spied in amongst the grass.





And a piece of limestone with veins of crystal... it almost looks like it's been moulded.





Finally we had a bit of a fossick ourselves. After our 15 minutes of sifting the dirt through our fingers, it was off to the sorting area. The little treasures went into the seive, and the lady helped us all to find the bones among the mud.





Anything of any scientific value was snarfed, but we got to keep all of what we found. These are our little treasures. Sorry the pic isn't so great, but they are all sooo tiny. To the left are the molars of tiny rat or mouse-sized marsupials. The curvy looking ones in the middle are rat incisors, and the fragments on the right are leg-type bones. The kind of reddish-brown one in the bottom right-hand corner is a hip joint.





There was quite a good display for us to see there too. Information on the types of species that had been found in the local area. Dunnarts and Dasyurids... that's what our fossils used to be.