Eromanga Natural History Museum

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Posted 2020-03-06 by Meg Forbes ⇒ follow

The in beautiful South West Queensland celebrates the region's distant past through 95 million year old dinosaur fossils, and mega fauna fossils that are upwards of 40 thousand years old.

Eromanga is approximately a 12 hour (1050Km) drive from Brisbane, making it good for long weekends, or, as it makes up part of the Natural Science Loop , it is easily incorporated into a road trip exploring this stunning, arid, corner of Queensland.

While Eromanga itself has a motel and caravan park , the also offers on-site stays at their 4-star Cooper's Country Lodge . After a few days on the road, having driven from Brisbane and camped up until this point, we treated ourselves to a night at Cooper's Country Lodge. This very well designed accommodation included adjoining rooms for families with children, kitchen and BBQ facilities, and importantly after a few days on the road, laundry facilities. The rooms and bathrooms were spotless, and staying here was one of the highlights of our trip.

The offers a number of tours and experiences. These include their Australian Dinosaur Giants Tour, group bookings, tours that include being trained to prep fossils for display at the museum (our kids loved the 1 hour version!) and run for up to 10 days of genuinely useful volunteer work for the museum, and tag along tours to digs. Details on all of the Eromanga Natural History Museum's tours (and their prices) can be found here .

We felt slightly anxious when staff at the museum told us they were introducing a tour for children to learn how to prep the fossils - what if one of our kids dropped a fossil? However, everyone involved in the tour was lovely and very relaxed, and our kids loved every minute of it.

Our son, who was slightly older, especially loved working with the mini-power tools on one of Cooper's (Australia's largest dinosaur) fossils.

Our daughter, who is a couple of years younger, especially enjoyed prepping the megafauna fossils from around Eulo (also on the Natural Sciences Loop, and to the south of Eromanga). The material around the megafaunal fossils, which date from about 40000 years ago, is much softer than that around Cooper's fossils, providing almost instant results.

Despite (or perhaps, because of) Eromanga Natural History Museum's remote location, this experience was one of our family's favourites across Australia to date. We were the only visitors on the fossil prepping tour, and the only visitors staying at Cooper's Country Lodge, besides the many birds and animals that appeared around sunset.

The is open throughout the Australian autumn, winter, and spring - exact opening dates are published here each year. Have you visited this fascinating, interactive museum yet?