His latest discovery has stunned the scientific community because Mr Elliott relied on an old map and kebab skewers from his kitchen to track the meteorites’ trajectory and their likely location on his 18,200ha (45,000-acre) property.

His meteorites are only the second such find in Queensland in 130 years. They caused widespread alarm in March 2004, when they arked over the small town of Winton soon after dark before crashing.

“A lot of people were pretty terrified,” Mr Elliott said yesterday. “They thought it was a terrorist attack, a plane crashing or missiles coming in.”

Although he did not see the meteorites fall, Mr Elliott, 49, felt sure that they had landed on his property or nearby. He drove around and interviewed as many people as he could find who had seen the meteorites blaze across the sky.

By recording the locations of witnesses and the direction from which they had observed the meteorites, he worked out that their likely landing site was on a small area of his property.

It took two years of searching but, in late May, Mr Elliott discovered the larger of the meteorites while riding a motorbike to herd some of his 11,000 sheep.

It was lying in flat, featureless territory. Fearing that he would not be able to relocate the spot, he rammed his rifle upright into the ground, next to the meteorite. Last week Mr Elliott discovered the second nearby. He said that he found the meteorites in a location where he had dreamt he would find them on the night they fell.

“It was such a vivid dream that I actually went out and had a look around there the next morning. There was nothing there,” he said. “I cannot believe they were there all the time.”

Mr Elliott is well known for having discovered Australia’s largest fossilised dinosaur bones — dated at 95 million years old — in 1999. Last December he discovered more dinosaur remains on his property, and he believes that they may be even larger than the first specimens. He has the bones laid out on a spare bed in his homestead.

Other curious treasures may be awaiting discovery on his property. The University of New South Wales has recently announced that an expedition operating 300km (186 miles) west of Mr Elliott’s property had discovered the fossils of large flesh-eating kangaroos, marsupial lions, tree-climbing crocodiles and a duck species that stood 3m (10ft) high.

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