You know how it goes. You’re looking to get a little exercise, so you decide to hike to the top of Mount Coolum on the Sunshine Coast. You make it to the top and you’re greeted by a giant velociraptor with a missing eye and tail.
At least, that’s what two Sunshine Coast women, Madison Bothe and Julia Blake, found during a recent hike. The raptor was formerly the property of Big Pineapple Music Festival, which takes place annually on the coast.
As ABC News reports, the 1.5-metre tall raptor, sans eye and tail, was stolen two years ago from one of the Big Pineapple fest stages and has only reappeared now, inexplicably enough, at the top of Mount Coolum.
“It would’ve taken a couple of guys to walk 40 minutes to get it up the top of Mount Coolum — it’s crazy,” festival director Mark Pico told ABC News. According to Bothe, the raptor wasn’t there when she’d hiked the peak the day before.
“The funny thing is I’d actually climbed Mount Coolum the afternoon before to catch the sunset and [the dinosaur] wasn’t there, so between then and Julia and me climbing it at 7.30 in the morning, they’d obviously done it overnight or early morning,” she said.
There was even a note attached to the dinosaur. “We thought it might’ve been a joke but then we googled it and to our surprise it came up that the dinosaur had actually been stolen from the Big Pineapple Music Festival in 2014,” said Bothe, who phoned the police after the discovery.
“I actually had to reassure the woman a few times that it wasn’t a joke, that we’d actually found a dinosaur at the top and that the dinosaur had apparently been stolen and she was laughing so much.”
“I wasn’t aware of it at the time but a few of the boys at the station positioned it at the entry door so when I walked in, you’re face high with a dinosaur,” Sergeant Ben Cox from the Coolum Police Station told ABC News.
“We come across some unusual things, but this was one of the more unusual.” No doubt the ‘Big Pineapple Velociraptor Incident’ will soon rival the Tamam Shud case as Australia’s most intriguing and unexplainable mystery.
