PALAEONTOLOGIST DR MATTHEW MCCURRY apologises that the remote paddock in central New South Wales where we’re standing on this cloudless winter’s morning is so visually uninspiring. The site, which is accessed by a dirt road and protected by locked gates, looks surprisingly ordinary, despite having been the focus of recent worldwide attention.
“It’s dry and it’s flat, with a few sporadic trees spread across a landscape that’s mostly parched grass with occasional thistles – a typical farmscape you’d expect in this part of NSW,” Matt says. Yet this particular nondescript location is being kept top secret, despite attracting international scientific attention and producing clues that may prove invaluable as Australia and the world grapple with unprecedented global warming.
“Fifteen million years ago [mya], based on the fossils we’ve found here, this would have been dense tropical-like rainforest with a thick canopy of plants competing for sunlight,” Matt explains. At its heart was a polluted, rust-red billabong – “a small waterbody flooded with iron, possibly an oxbow lake”.
Matt picks up one of the heavy black-and-ochre fragments of rock littering this part of the paddock that make it such a bugger to plough. This material is the reason why a crack team of fossil hunters – both professional and volunteer – have driven in a convoy of four-wheel-drives early this morning from nearby Gulgong, the heritage-listed goldrush town that appeared on the first $10 note in 1966 when Australia introduced decimal currency.
These rocks may not contain gold, but to palaeontologists they have much richer veins to reveal. The life forms they encase speak of a vastly different Australia, from a time when our island continent was drifting imperceptibly but irrevocably northwards in its post-Gondwana divorce from Antarctica. That’s when a chain of volcanoes burst through Earth’s crust, leaving remnants that can still be seen in a north–south divide that, AG 156).
