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2003 marks the 100th anniversary of the finding of the terminal toe bone (claw) of a carnivorous dinosaur, commonly referred to as the Cape Paterson Claw.
The following excerpt from 'Dinosaurs of Darkness' is authored by Dr Thomas Rich, Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology, Museum Victoria, and Professor
Patricia Vickers-Rich, Chair in Palaeontology at Monash University, Victoria:
William Hamilton Ferguson was a Mines Department of Victoria geologist who was searching for coal along the coast near the town of Inverloch in 1903.
He possessed an uncanny knack for finding fossils where others could locate none. This is exactly what he did on the coast at a place immediately west of a prominent rock stack called Eagle's Nest.
There he discovered and collected an isolated toe bone of a carnivorous dinosaur, the first dinosaur bone found in Australia to be described in a scientific paper. In his paper he described a lungfish tooth from the same site.
The locality of both specimens was meticulously marked on his exquisite geological map of the area...
It was a frequent practice at that time for Australian fossils to be sent overseas to be scientifically analysed, because the requisite expertise to carry out such studies was generally thought not to exist within Australia. The specimen was sent to England and described by A. Smith Woodward of what is today the Natural History Museum, London, who assigned it to the long-established English genus Megalosaurus.
Source: Rich, TH and Vickers-Rich, P 2000.
Dinosaurs of Darkness, Allen & Unwin, Australia.
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