Burrunjor: The Search for Australia’s Living Tyrannosaurus by Rex & Heather Gilroy: book review

Burrunjor: The Search for Australia’s Living Tyrannosaurus by Rex & Heather Gilroy (2011) is an account – with ample black and white photographs – of two people’s search across Australia for an alleged small species of living dinosaur – one that survived the extinction period.

Is a living dinosaur from the Cretaceous period possible? Despite much skepticism, criticism, and ridicule, the two cryptozoologists have been searching for the ‘impossible’ since the mid-1970s.

The Gilroys (and others) go Burrunjor hunting in remote, rugged swamplands, forests, and deserts in South Australia, Queensland, Northern Territory, and Western Australia. Finding fossils, bones, and footprints of other species of dinosaurs, as well as the Burrunjor, they record their finds and photograph the landscape.

They write too of the many, many sightings of the Burrunjor by people living in the outback. The first alleged sighting of the Burrunjor occurred in 1905, following possible sightings of the Bunyip and the Murra-murri since 1845 – other ‘mythical’ Australian creatures. The Gilroys include the exact dates of the sightings, and conclude that ‘it is certain that they were once commonplace enough in those regions for the tribal artists to engrave or paint images’ of them. Most sightings were of a solitary creature, while other people saw several in a small herd.

The Burrunjor walked on their hind legs, had big-clawed toes, large greyish scales on their legs and feet, and had ‘an unearthly roar.’ By the end of the book, the Gllroy cryptozoologists had not given up their perpetual search for the Burrunjor.

Like other books on searching for mythical beasts, people will either believe it, or not.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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