- ——— . ae ee
Editors P. VICKERS-RICH, J.M. MONAGHAN R.E BAIRD & T.H. RICH
With the assistance of E.M. Thompson éz C. Williams
VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY OF AUSTRALASIA
Editors P. VICKERS-RICH, J.©M.-MONAGHAN, R.E BAIRD & T.H.RICH
With the assistance of E.M.Thompson & C.Williams
Graphics by D. Gelt Photography by S. Morton & F. Coffa
Pioneer Design Studio peration with th
in coope ith the Monash University Publications Committee, Melbourne
First published in 1991 by Pioneer Design Studio Pty Ltd 486 Maroondah Highway, Lilydale, Victoria, 3140 for and in co-operation with the Monash University Publications Committee, Melbourne © P. Vicers-Rich 1991
Typeset in Australia Printed and bound in Singapore ISBN 0 909674 36 1
Reprinted 1991
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Geologic Time Scale reproduced on page xv from: Harland, W. B., Armstrong, R. L., Cox, A.V., Craig, L. E., Smith, A. G., & Smith, D. G. 1989. A Geologic Time Scale. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge.
PREFACE
In 1982 publication of this volume's predecessor, The Fossil Vertebrate Record of Australasia, was a milestone. That book provided a remarkably valuable reference for palaeontologists and biologists who have an interest in the evolution of vertebrates in Australasia. The dog-eared covers and almost fatally broken spine of my copy provide clear evidence of the many times it has been consulted by me and my colleagues.
The central theme of this new volume, Australasian vertebrate palaeontology, is the same as that of its predecessor, but the interpretations of the theme are richer and more diverse and the cast of authors has been enhanced. As the historical accounts opening this book vividly relate, the origins of the current, expanding activity in Australasian vertebrate palaeontology are complex, but two figures loom large. The scientific contributions and contagious enthusiasm of Profs. W.D.L. Ride and R.A. Stirton played a major role. Many of the chapters in The Fossil Vertebrate Record of Australasia were authored by David's and Stirt's students. In this new volume we find abundant evidence that not only does this "mob" continue to be active, but now they are being joined by the next generation including their students as well as palaeontologists with other academic backgrounds.
The fossil record of Australasia cannot be faulted for limitations in temporal range. Its oldest records include the Ediacaran fauna that documents the diversity of invertebrate life in the seas of the later Precambrian. The first traces of vertebrates are specimens of agnathan fishes of Middle Ordovician age. Footprints on an Early Devonian sandy river bank in eastern Australia illustrate the evolutionary emergence of tetrapods long before that group is known from skeletal remains. Other occurrences of fossil vertebrates, analyzed with equal insight in this volume, provide us with glimpses of the subsequent evolution of vertebrates in Australasia. However, it resembles a cheap grade of Swiss Cheese -- one with greater voids than substance; the fossil record available for study is disfigured by "ghastly blanks".
These blanks in the fossil record remain vexatious, but each year they shrink in number and duration. Long days spent by the authors and their colleagues in the quiet of the Outback to the west of the Birdsville Track, following the ebb and flow of the tides to recover fossils from rocks in sea cliffs, as well as in other areas of the continent are paying off in generous dividends. Their updated versions of compilations of basic data on fossil localities are starting points for future research. Many acknowledgements of personal communications from other palaeontologists, or to works in press, are a promising measure of the information that soon will appear in scientific publications.
Although any assessment of the status of Australasian vertebrate palaeontology must account for changes in the research data base and the cast of researchers, of greater significance is the development of the research questions that are being addressed. Palaeontologists are far from bashful in posing questions concerning the nature of the mechanism and causal factors that have directed the course of vertebrate evolution. It's easily as healthy a cottage industry as the generation of speculations about what killed off the dinosaurs. The chapters in this volume show that an impressive array of palaeobiological questions are being successfully addressed in research on Australasian vertebrates.
Early workers, Lamarck, Owen, and other 19th Century biologists, recognized that the unique character of the Australasian fauna reflected the much later survival of many groups in this area than on other continents. In his influential book, Climate and Evolution, William Diller Matthew argued that the terrestrial vertebrate faunas of Australia and other southern
continents had their origins in stocks that evolved in Holarctica and then were displaced southward by their descendants. Many years later Philip Hershkovitz dubbed this pattern the "Sherwin-Williams effect," a reference to that paint company's advertising symbol depicting a can of paint being poured over a globe. Further, in the context of a stablist view of continental positions, Matthew considered and rejected the possibility that the occurrence of closely related mammals or other members of the terrestrial faunas of Australia and South America reflected interchange across Antarctica.
Understanding of the changes in positions of continents, patterns of circulation of the oceans, currents, and continental climates through the course of earth history continues to expand. The following studies show that during the late Palaeozoic and early Mesozoic Australasia formed the tip of the southern peninsula of Pangaea; dispersal of vertebrates across this globally continuous supercontinent appears to have been little impeded. Later in the Mesozoic changes in climate regimes left Australasia partially cloistered biogeographically by the high latitude environments of South Polar Antarctica. During the late Mesozoic and early Cainozoic shifts in continental position and climatic change increased Australasia's biogeographic isolation and magnified its role as a haven for vicariantly isolated populations of lineages that had or would become extinct in the Northern Hemisphere. Australasia's continued northward movement first maintained its isolation but then brought it into closer proximity of southeastern Asia, so increasing the probability of chance dispersal of birds, bats and, later, rats and other terrestrial vertebrates.
Analyses of the evolution of Australasian biogeographic patterns have advanced beyond the level of debates over the primacy of dispersal or vicariance. Informative studies presented in this book reveal the complex interplay of these factors at continental and smaller scales as well as the environmental consequences of changing global climates and the latitudinal position of Australasia. Data on the avian and terrestrial vertebrate faunas of smaller islands of Australasia, for example, have increased to a point where they are pertinent to testing and qualifying the MacArthur-Wilson hypothesis of insular biogeography.
On a larger scale, additions to the available fossil record add substantially to an interpretation of the biogeographic history of marsupials, my particular pets, which until recently had fallen into disfavor. Recent discoveries strongly indicate that the "Sherwin- Williams effect" probably accurately describes the origin of the group in the Northern Hemisphere and its dispersal into South America, but not Australia. Dispersal of marsupials, but not their eutherian contemporaries, across Antarctica to Australia, a possibility rejected by W.D. Matthew, probably occurred very late in the Mesozoic or early in the Cainozoic. Then vicariant isolation set the physical stage for an extensive evolutionary radiation of Australasian marsupials. Further movement of the continent toward the Equator and southeastern Asia increasingly opened the door to dispersal of plants and animals into Australasia that, in turn, affected the course of evolution of its marsupial fauna.
Biogeographic analyses are only as strong as the understanding of the evolutionary interrelationships of the organisms being studied. The authors show that taxonomic research on Australasian vertebrates is being rapidly advanced on many fronts. Modern methods of analysis of phylogenetic relationships are being applied to a widening spectrum of data. Discoveries of members of new living and prehistoric species are yielding hitherto unknown data. Biomolecular studies bringing new data from living and recently extinct lineages are providing additional kinds of information for the taxonomic analyses. Inventive studies of form and function of marsupial dentitions and avian egg shells add not only data for studies of evolutionary interrelationships, but also provide a better appreciation of their ecological roles. Additionally, taphonomic studies of the fossil assemblages refine interpretations of the composition of the biotas from which they are drawn.
The modern terrestrial biota of Australasia, like those of many other continents, is in part the product of late Pleistocene or Subrecent extinctions that decimated many lineages of large
vertebrates. The quality of the fossil record of Australasia surpasses that of other southern continents and provides and opportunity to study another evolutionary "experiment" as climatic change and human intervention had their impacts on such late Pleistocene and Subrecent biotas.
The authors of this volume have provided us with both a valuable standing ground and a significant point whose pages soon will acquire the patina characteristic of oft-consulted references. The contributions clearly illustrate the current, rapidly accelerating pace of vertebrate palaeontological research in Australasia and document our colleagues’ research
accomplishments. As a major reference work, it is destined to serve as a starting point for many lines of future research.
W.A. Clemens Berkeley, California August 1990
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CONTENTS
Preface v
Introduction x1
Acknowledgements xiii
Geologic Time Scale xv BACKGROUND TO THE FOSSIL RECORD
1. Squatters, Priests and Professors: A Brief History of Vertebrate Palaeontology in Terra Australis. P. Vickers-Rich & N. W. Archbold 1
2. Vertebrate Palaeontology in Australia: The American Contribution. R.H. Tedford 45
3. | Musings on New Guinea Fossil Vertebrate Discoveries. M.D. Plane 85
4. Palaeoclimatic Setting and Palaeogeographic Links of Australia in the Phanerozoic. L. A. Frakes & P. Vickers-Rich 111
5. An Introduction to the Literature of Palaeontology with Reference to the Fossil Vertebrates of Australasia. M. Chiba 147
TECHNIQUES AND ANALYSIS OF FOSSILS
6. | Techniques Used in Preparation of Terrestrial Vertebrates. M. Whitelaw & L. Kool 173 7. Predicting the Diet of Fossil Mammals. G. D. Sanson 201 8. The Diet of the Extinct Bandicoot Chaeropus ecaudatus. W. Wright, G. D. Sanson & C. McArthur 229 9. Reconstructing the Natural History of Extinct Animals: Ektopodon as a Case History. N. Pledge 247 10. The Taphonomy of Late Quaternary Cave Localities Yielding Vertebrate Remains in Australia. R. F. Baird 267 11. Preservation of Biomolecular Information in Fossils fron Australia. M. Rowley 311
VERTEBRATE FOSSIL RECORD OF AUSTRALASIA
12. The Long History of Australian Fossil Fishes. J. A. Long 337
13. Palaeozoic Vertebrate Microfossils in Australia. S. Turner 429
14. —_ Australian Mesozoic and Cainozoic Lungfish. A. Kemp 465
15. Chondrichthyans in the Cretaceous and Tertiary of Australia. N.R. Kemp 497 16. Australian Fossil Amphibians. A. Warren 569
17. _ Australian Fossil Frogs. M. J. Tyler 591
12. Fossil Reptiles in Australia. R. E. Molnar 605
19. The Fossil Turtles of Australia. E.S. Gaffney 703
The Mesozoic and Tertiary History of Birds on the Australian Plate.
P. Vickers-Rich 721
The Quaternary Avifauna of Australia. R. F. Baird 809
Fossil Eggs from the Tertiary and Quaternary of Australia. D. L. G. Williams & P. Vickers-Rich 871
The History of Mammals in Terra Australis. T. H. Rich 893
The Pleistocene Megafauna of Australia. P. Murray 1071
The Australasian Marine Vertebrate Record and its Climatic and Geographic Implications. R. E. Fordyce 1165
A New Look at the Fossil Vertebrate Record of New Zealand. R. E. Fordyce 1191 The Quaternary Avifauna of New Zealand. P.R. Millener 1317
Vertebrate Fossil Faunas from Islands in Australasia and the Southwest Pacific. C. W. Meredith 1345
The Fossil Vertebrate Record of New Caledonia. J.C. Balouet 1383 Systematic, Geographic and Geologic Index 1411
Index 1419
INTRODUCTION
Vertebrate Palaeontology of Australasia is the direct outgrowth of an earlier book entitled The Fossil Vertebrate Record of Australasia edited by P. V. Rich and E. M. Thompson and published first in 1982. The original book grew from a series of lectures given in second and third year Earth Sciences and Zoology courses coordinated by P. V. Rich and J. W. Warren at Monash University. These courses involved many of the book's authors, whose participation was underwritten and supported by both the departments of Earth Sciences and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Monash University. This initial support was critical to making a reality of both resultant books.
Unlike The Fossil Vertebrate Record of Australasia, this book has been published through a commercial publisher. This was possible because of the commitment of this publisher to the principle of making the book, this time twice the length of its predecessor, available at a price that students and scientists alike could afford, both in Australia and overseas. And, this economical production was carried out without sacrificing editorial and production quality. We, as editors, are extremely grateful for the efforts made by Derrick Stone who heads Pioneer Design Studio in this regard, and would encourage more such cooperative efforts along these lines between authors-editors and publishers. This book would, likewise, not have been viable without the generous monetary support provided by the Monash University Publications Committee, who by their injection of funds allowed a larger press run, which, of course, lowered unit costs. To them we give our greatest appreciation.
The purpose of this volume on Australasian vertebrate palacontology is to present a state- of-the-art resumé of the different disciplines that compose this rapidly growing scientific endeavour in Australia, New Zealand, the southwest Pacific and Antarctica. Vertebrate Palaeontology of Australasia is divided into three major sections: Background to the Fossil Record, Techniques and Analysis of Fossils and Vertebrate Fossil Record of Australasia. The first section presents the history of vertebrate palacontology on the Australian continent and in New Guinea; an overview of the geological history and palacoenvironmental setting during the history of vertebrates, with emphasis on Australia; and a final chapter on the literature of vertebrate palaeontology for the Australasian area.
The second section outlines the different kinds of techniques - collecting, preparation, and analytic - that have been applied to Australasian fossil vertebrates, not fundamentally different from those applied anywhere else, but the results of case studies on reconstructing of function based on morphologic form are unique to this biogeographic region, because the animals dealt with are endemic. Many of the chapters in this section are new, such as that by Whitelaw & Kool (Chap. 6) on preparation and collection techniques and that by Rowley (Chap. 11) on biomolecular analyses as applied to vertebrate fossil remains in Australasia. New, too, is a chapter on the interpretation of the dict of a recently extinct bandicoot, Chaeropus, which still had available for study a carcass with stomach contents that could be consulted after interpretations based on dental morphology were drawn (Wright, Sanson & McArthur, Chap. 8), as well as a chapter on taphonomy of vertebrate bone accumulations in caves (Baird, Chap.
he third section deals specifically with the vertebrate fossils that have been recovered from Australasia, and this data has grown considerably since the publication in 1982 of The Fossil Vertebrate Record of Australasia. Much of the added length of this book over its predecessor is a direct reflection of the growth of this data, and, in fact, this may be the last time it is
possible to write such a compendium, unless a multivolume work is produced. The new information accruing is enormous, and with the rapidly growing number of new workers in vertebrate palaeontology dealing with Australasian subjects, this trend is likely to continue and accelerate in the years to come.
All of the original topics covered in The Fossil Vertebrate Record of Australasia have been retained in this new book and updated, but in addition, new chapters on vertebrate microfossils (Turner, Chap. 13), fossil turtles (Gaffney, Chap. 19), fossil eggs (Williams & Rich, Chap. 22), the Quaternary avifauna of Australia (Baird, Chap. 21), the Quaternary megafauna (Murray, Chap. 24), the Quaternary avifauna of New Zealand (Milliner, Chap. 27), the vertebrate fossil faunas of islands of Australasia, including the southwestern Pacific (Meredith, Chap. 28) and the fossil vertebrates of New Caledonia (Balouet, Chap. 29) have been added.
This volume is the end result of 8 years of work to bring the preliminary volume, The Fossil Vertebrate Record of Australasia, up to the standard of a finished version, both updated and polished, and to increase both the quality and quantity of the illustrations. We hope that the book will find use both as a standard reference work for the Australasian area and as a textbook for the beginning student of palaeontology who has special interests in this most intriguing biogeographic area of the Earth.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Vertebrate Palaeontology of Australasia would not exist if it were not for much hard work and dedication of a considerable number of individuals. Four stand out from the rest because of the massive time and effort put into this long term project: Corrie Williams, Mary Lee Macdonald, Elizabeth Thompson and Mary Walters. They were involved in such activities as the detailed editing, proof-reading, paste-ups, letter writing to authors and reviewers, photocopying and pursuing numerous jobs related to production of everything from initial manuscripts to final camera-ready copy. Corrie was also involved in compiling the systematic appendix. Much of the work they did was unpaid, which makes their dedication all the more appreciated.
Absolutely critical to completion of this project, too, was draftswoman Draga Gelt (Earth Sciences Department, Monash University), who provided most of the artwork in this volume, most of which was originally prepared as parts of research papers or for teaching purposes, but most had to be slightly modified for inclusion in this book. Steve Morton (Physics Department, Monash University), photographer extraordinaire, produced most of the photographic illustrations and provided copies of material so that backup was available in case of loss during production of the final book.
Much of the writing and manuscript production, especially of the final camera-ready copy, was carried out using Microsoft Word (both versions 3.0 and 4.0) on an Apple Macintosh SE and an Apple Laserwriter Plus for printing. Professor Gordon Lister was critical in convincing PVR to use the Macintosh system, and thus we are grateful to him not only for that but for providing half of the funds needed to purchase the Mac SE. We are also grateful to the Earth Sciences Department at Monash University for use of the Laser Writer and to the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department for providing the funds to purchase paper and ink cartridges for the Laser Writer. We are also grateful to Monash University, especially the Earth Sciences Department, for providing the atmosphere in which such a book could develop, as a direct result of an intensive, in depth series of courses dealing with vertebrate fossils and evolution, over a period of years. Francis de Souza provided invaluable ("life saving") computer assistance in compilation of the index
During the final stages of this project Computer Knowledge in Melbourne provided us with a second Mac SE needed for editorial work, for which we are most grateful. We wish to especially thank Michael Smart and Bernie Hogan of Computer Knowledge for their help with hardware and software throughout this project.
Many other people are also due our gratitude: Frank Knight, Derrick Stone of Pioneer Design Studio and the Museum of Victoria for the use of reconstructions by Frank Knight of Australian fossil vertebrates from Kadimakara. Extinct Vertebrates of Australia, Frank Coffa (Museum of Victoria, Department of Photography) for providing photographs of Australian fossil vertebrates; Simon Lai for translation of magnetic media into a usable form; J. R. Macdonald and Rhys Walkley for their reviews of each chapter; L. Kool, I. Brailey, N. Schroeder for assistance in editing and gathering research materials; R. K. Johns and the Department of Mines and Energy, South Australia for providing illustrations of H.Y.L. Brown, M. Beckers for her help in typing two of the chapters; P. Hermansen and Francis de Souza for assistance with cranky computers and software; A. Carle, D. McCarry and G. Royce for help with the financial aspects of the project. Also important in allowing this book to develop were fellow members of the Monash University staff, who through discussion, and in some cases
provision of illustrative material and financial support, aided in development of ideas and final production of this book, especially Ray Cas, Joe Monaghan, Ian Nicholls, Neil Archbold, Bob Gregory and Jim Warren. Patricia Komarower is especially thanked for carrying a heavy load of teaching during two years of co-teaching with PVR, which allowed editorial work to proceed, when otherwise it certainly would have faltered. Many other individuals provided illustrative material, and they are thanked in captions for the figures throughout the text.
Each chapter was assessed by at least two reviewers, some who have remained anonymous, and their help is gratefully acknowledged: A.K Behrensmeyer (National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.), H. Olson (National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.), W. Boles (Australian Museum, Sydney), C. Mourer-Chauviré (University Claude Bernard, Villeurbanne Cedex, France), C.W. Meredith (Australian Biological Research Group, Melbourne), D. W. Steadman (New York State Museum, Albany, New York), Dianne Clifford (Golden Grove, Western Australia), F. Whitmore (National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.), P.R. Millener (National Museum of New Zealand, Wellington), J. Bowler (Museum of Victoria, Melbourne), J.A. Long (Western Australian Museum, Perth), N.A. Pledge (South Australian Museum, Adelaide), G. C. Young (Bureau of Mineral Resources, Canberra), A. Ritchie (Australian Museum, Sydney), T. F. Flannery (Australian Museum, Sydney), J. Hope (Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service, Sydney), R. Wells (Flinders University, Adelaide), G. D. Sanson (Monash University, Melbourne), G. F. van Tets (C.S.I.R.O., Canberra), D. F. Brannagan (University of Sydney, Sydney), W. D. L. Ride (Australian National University, Canberra), M. O. Woodburne (University of California, Riverside), G. Lowenstein (University of California, San Francisco), J. Ramshaw (C.S.LR.O., Melbourne), E. L. Lundelius (University of Texas, Austin), P. Janvier (Université Paris VI), M. Davies (University of Adelaide), R. Estes (San Diego State University), K. Kelly (Museum of Victoria, Melbourne), I. Norton (Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston), and K. F. Hirsch (University of Colorado, Boulder).
A great debt of gratitude is due many funding agencies, which, either through direct support for this project or indirect support for research programmes that yielded the information in this book, have been critical to its completion: the National Geographic Society, the Australian Research Council, Monash University, Computer Knowledge, the Museum of Victoria, Earthwatch, the Ingram Trust, the Danks Trust, the Ian Potter Foundation, Western Mining, International Chemical Industries, Safeway Australia, the Australia-China Council, the Australian Academy of Sciences, the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service, the Australian-American Educational Foundation, Friends of the Museum of Victoria, Sunshine Foundation, the Australian Army, Atlas Copco, Ingersoll-Rand, Shell, Mobil Oil, the Victorian Police, the Surf and Life Saving Association and last, but certainly not least, the Publications Committee of Monash University.
This book is dedicated to four people who have been especially significant in nurturing, in some way, most of the current crop of vertebrate palacontologists active in Australia today as well as significantly pushing ahead the frontiers of this science in the 20th century: Dr. R. A. Stirton ("Stirt"), now deceased, formerly of the University of California, Berkeley; Dr. W. D. L. Ride (Department of Geology, Australian National University, Canberra); Dr. R. H. Tedford (Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, the American Museum of Natural History, New York) and Mr. Paul Lawson (formerly of the South Australian Museum, Adelaide). Their stories are told in the pages of this book. Without their infectious enthusiasm, their uncanny ability to find bones and inspire others, vertebrate palaeontology in Australasia would most certainly not be the vibrant science that it is today.
——
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CHAPTER 1
SQUATTERS, PRIESTS AND PROFESSORS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY IN TERRA AUSTRALIS
Patricia Vickers-Rich! and Neil W. Archbold?
PEE CHOTE ta) cea ee gat enlntess cantare if. reatey tees 1 Antipodean Discoveries, Grist for the Bir Peay MAT ectsicsresteansnnts yevete eos thinas agen 1 Barkly XcOdStaleSutve ys nccte.sslunesecte ss eae 1 Ei PAnGl: SUVS YS Bote iiss cliccedetealeds (ahd etotnenb carts 4 NBOLOLET PO RDIOKIS, Ad.Te acl vrcdt svapaaplre an hie tehe wie 8 Gold Rushes, Museum and Sydney Gentry Beginnings of a Home Based Science....... 11 Gold and Beginnings of the State Surveys...... 12 Repositories of Fossil Objects: the First VIS SUTIES 6 alent satis tp oh aoe anne cdoeen slew taete {2 Beginnings of Independent Training: THE TWMEVOTSHUES At betas cium Aletta ene eles 15 Rapid Communication on a Local Scale: the Scieheirio- SOCMGS 56.0555 005 oe te are 22 Men of Influence, Pioneers in Australian Vertebrate Palacontolo PY ins ccescescnsenttovsnt 22 Australian Independence and International COGPCTANOM YEA MR Ti ee ah A 31 PRORSHOW LOGS OMVCAIS c02 50 tis vcnu decd ste dnedcuctics subciest de 39 IREIEIENCES «ioh sig tobv aided Pada eeete a ei dca bE 39
1 Earth Sciences and Ecology/Evolutionary Biology Departments, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia. 2 Department of Geology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3052, Australia.
2- RICH & ARCHBOLD
INTRODUCTION
In his study on 'The Spread of Western Science' George Basalla (1967) presented a model of how Western science has characteristically developed and grown outside of Europe, often in three major stages: (1) a stage when the newly discovered territory serves as a source of new data for European science; (2) a stage still primarily colonial in aspect, but during which the local scientists accept fuller responsibility for investigation and interpretation of the data themselves; and (3) a stage when the indigenous scientists attain, or make efforts to attain, an independent scientific tradition constructing self-supporting institutions, receive scientific training in their own country, develop independent societies, and "formulate indigenous scientific attitudes and goals" (Moyal 1976). Certainly, this has been much the path taken by vertebrate palaeontology in Australia, and it has only recently entered the final of Basalla's stages. It is still a science limited to a small band of professionals with a growing support of associated non-professionals. It is still a science with unfathomed areas in need of exploration, still very much in a pioneering era of discovery (Vallance 1975, 1978, Rich & Thompson 1982).
The following paper is a brief overview of vertebrate palaeontological work in Australia, starting with its beginnings in the early 19th century and continuing to 1989. It is organized utilizing Basalla's developmental divisions, even though there are often no clearcut boundaries separating each of these stages.
ANTIPODEAN DISCOVERIES, GRIST FOR THE EUROPEAN MILL
Prior to discoveries by Europeans, Aboriginal legends existed, which perhaps had stemmed from an acquaintance with prehistoric bones or even living prehistoric animals themselves (Fig. 1). Tribes in eastern Australia were quite fearful of the bunyip (Barrett 1946), sometimes described as a monstrous animal that supposedly inhabited deep waterholes and roamed the billabongs at night. When confronted with the remains of some of the now extinct Australian marsupials, Aborigines would often identify them as the bunyip (Barrett 1946, Dugan 1980). Rich (1979 and in Rich & van Tets 1985) has noted legends about the mihirung paringmal of western Victorian Aborigines, which may allude to the currently extinct giant birds, the Dromornithidae. Some of the legends describing such creatures led to the discovery of rich vertebrate fossil fields, such as those at Lake Callabonna in South Australia in the late 19th century (Hale 1956).
It was not these legends, however, that led to a detailed understanding of the past veretebrate faunas of Australia, but European and later indiginous exploration that produced the fossils and formed the basis for the recognition of a succession of Australian vertebrate faunas spanning almost the last 500 million years.
EARLY COASTAL SURVEYS
The first European expeditions in the early part of the 19th century did not produce the remains of fossil vertebrates, but did, instead, locate invertebrate and plant fossils and even the living remnants of some vertebrate groups now extinct. The Matthew Flinders Expedition of 1801-1805 (Flinders 1814) and the French Nicholas Baudin Expedition of 1800-1804 (Fig. 2) were two such enterprises. The Baudin Expedition, splendidly outfitted with both equipment
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 3
and scientists, returned fossil and modern natural history material to Europe. This material included living specimens of the now extinct, dwarf King Island Emu (Dromaius baudinus), which were kept alive in France for some time after their arrival. J. C. Bailly, a mineralogist attached to the Baudin expedition, reported fossil ferns in shales near Parramatta and fossil plants collected from Tasmania, which were assigned to what would now be called the Carboniferous by Leopold von Buch (1814), after examining the specimens in Paris.
Figure 1. Aboriginal art in the Cape York Peninsula caves and elsewhere in Australia depict animals that may now be extinct. This cave art in the Quinkan Gallery, site B(5) recorded in Trezise (1971) maybe one of the extinct dromomithids, perhaps Genyornis.
Also included in the collections from Terra Australis was the clam Trigonia brought up in a dredge haul off King Island in Bass Strait. Jean Baptiste Lamarck, famous for his evolutionary theories but also a highly respected and influential invertebrate zoologist of this period, was struck by the resemblance of the living Trigonia to forms known only as fossils in Europe and elsewhere in the world. The concept that Australia was somehow a haven, a refuge, for organisms that could no longer survive elsewhere had its origins in these early discoveries. Australia was viewed as a land of living fossils, and this was further reinforced as exploration continued inland later in the 19th century.
The unfortunate Flinders Expedition, unlike the highly successful Baudin enterprise, ended in shipwreck and the loss of most specimens, except for a few that the shipboard botanist, Robert Brown (1773-1858), had surreptitiously taken ashore with him in Sydney when he left the expedition. Although not mentioned in his catalogues, of which he kept a duplicate set when Flinders sailed away, fossil invertebrates and plants were returned to Europe and England. Brown returned to England in 1805 with three cases of "minerals," a part of his possessions that passed through Customs (Vallance 1978). Some of these fossils were definitely presented to the Rev. William Buckland at Oxford, who concluded (1821) that the Australian coal was comparable to that of the Carboniferous of England and that the marine fossil invertebrates
4-RICH & ARCHBOLD
were similar to those of the Mountain Limestone of Derbyshire. James Sowerby (1818a, 1818b) had previously described morphological details of the invertebrates. Brown's name comes up several times in new species being named by palaeontologists in both England and
op ArAntl: PREMIER SNS gee err ~~ TNS 4 Fé
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Figure 2. Nicholas Baudin and his ships used on the first major scientific expedition to Australia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Bavdin's expedition was splendidly outfitted and returned to France with an array of new forms, both fossil and recent, that greatly expanded the European knowledge about Australia. (Courtesy of the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris).
Europe describing Australian material, e.g. Glossopteris browniana, a fossil seed fern described by Adolphe Brongniart (1828) based on fossils from New South Wales passed onto him by William Buckland. Buckland had evidently received it originally from Brown. Charles Konig (also spelled Koenig, see Archbold 1986) was also to describe some of the invertebrate fossils, such as the brachiopod, Trigonotreta stokesii (Konig 1825, Brown 1946). Both of these forms are now known to be classic Permian Gondwanan species, reflecting a very different arrangement of the continents of the world than characterise the present.
INLAND SURVEYS
Other coastal surveys followed, and visitors to Australia returned collections of fossils to Europe. Plants and invertebrates were mentioned (see Vallance 1981 and Archbold 1986 for details), but no vertebrate fossils of note were found. This was to change dramatically with the inland explorations carried out by Major (later Sir) Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, Surveyor- General of New South Wales from 1828 until his death in 1855 (Foster 1985).
T. L. Mitchell was to map in detail and procure many specimens of bones from the Wellington Valley caves (Fig. 3) of New South Wales (Mitchell 1838). He first visited the caves on 26th June 1830 with a local colonist, George Ranken. Ranken had previously
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 5
Figure 3. A younger (left) and an older Sir Thomas Mitchell, who led an expedition into interior New South Wales in 1830. His recovery of fossil vertebrates from caves in the Wellington Valley (below) led to the first extinct vertebrates from Australia being described in a scientific paper. (Courtesy of E. B. Joyce from Mitchell 1838).
6- RICH & ARCHBOLD
discovered some bone fragments (Ranken 1916) and had taken them to Sydney in order to send them to Professor Robert Jameson of the University of Edinburgh (Anderson 1933).
Ranken's discovery of fossil bones was announced in the Sydney Gazette of 25th May 1830 in an anonymous letter (signed L.) by the Rev. Dr John Dunmore Lang. Lang left Sydney on the 14th August 1830 with Ranken's specimens, his own Sydney Gazette letter and a short manuscript by Mitchell on the Wellington caves. By early 1831 all were in the hands of Jameson, the two notes being published in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal. Both notes were credited to Lang, but in the subsequent volume Mitchell's note was correctly attributed to him (see Lang 1831, Mitchell 1831a).
Mitchell revisited the caves on the 3rd July 1830 and collected further specimens. These were apparently sent to the Geological Society of London with a letter dated the 14th October 1830 (read at the Geological Society of London meeting of 13th April 1831 - see Mitchell 1831b).
Various specimens collected by Ranken and possibly Mitchell were examined by William Clift, Conservator of the Hunterian Museum (College of Surgeons), who identified dasyurids, wombats and kangaroos (Clift 1831). Joseph Barclay Pentland (see footnote by T. G. Vallance in Dugan 1980) living in Paris, commented extensively on material sent to Paris from England and also independent information on the Wellington caves from Peter Cunningham, author of the 1827 book Two Years in New South Wales (see Pentland 1831, 1832 and Jameson 1831b). Jameson also offered editorial comment on William Clift's conclusions (Jameson 1831a - see Dugan 1980 on the importance of this for challenging Baron Georges Cuvier's contemporary catastrophist theories). William Buckland (1831) considered that some bones might represent either rhinoceros or hippopotamus, and Baron Cuvier (see Pentland 1833b, 1833c) also examined specimens.
Such was the interest in Europe on the Wellington caves discoveries, that many of the notes and letters discussed above were translated and published in contemporary German journals (Jameson 1832a, 1832b, Mitchell 1832a, 1832b, Pentland 1833a, 1833c ).
Mitchell's records on the discovery of vertebrate fossils at the Wellington caves (Fig. 4) are not without humor, for as he noted in his diary:
"The pit (Breccia Cave) had been first entered only a short time before I examined it, by Mr. Ranken, to whose assistance in the researches, I am much indebted. He went down, by means of a rope, to one landing place, and then fixing the rope to what seemed a projecting portion of rock, he let himself down another stage, where he discovered, on the fragment [a giant bird femur, probably from a member of the family Dromornithidae] giving way, that the rope had been fastened to a very large bone, and thus these fossils were discovered" (Mitchell 1838: 362)."
The bone which Mr. Ranken misjudged was the "lower end, mutilated, and encrusted with the red stalagmite of the cave ...." of a femur that was identified by Sir Richard Owen as belonging to a large bird, previously unknown. It was figured in Mitchell's (1838) publication (Fig. 5), but was subsequently lost, perhaps during the bombing of London during World War Il.
Mitchell's discoveries of fossil bones had aroused the interest of overseas scientists in extinct Australian vertebrates, and there followed many years of European and Australian alike collecting fossil remains. Most all of this material was sent from the shores of Terra Australis for description and study by foreign experts, as the needed expertise and comparative collections did not exist in Australia. It was not until the latter part of the 19th century, that indigenous workers began to study the local fossils in any serious way, even though several
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 7
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8 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
residents, such as Leichhardt and Stutchbury suggested local material should remain in Australia (Branagan, pers. comm.).
"FOREIGN EXPERTS"
It was Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), renowned British comparative anatomist, who described much of the new fossil vertebrate material from Australia (and New Zealand) as it came to light when inland exploration and settlement expanded (e.g. Owen 1843, 1845, 1877, 1879a, 1879b, 1879c, 1882) (Fig. 6). In an appendix to Mitchell's volumes on his three expeditions into interior Australia published in 1838 (Fig. 5), Owen identified some of the fossils as gigantic marsupials, Nototherium and Diprotodon . Although Mitchell's and Ranken's material from Wellington caves was examined and reported on by Cuvier and Pentland, and Darwin was aware of it as well when he visited Australia in 1836, it was Owen who undertook the tedious job of description and study. He, like the French before him, suggested that "it was necessary to search Britain's secondary (oolitic) [Mesozoic] formations to find specimens analogous to Australia's recent marsupial fossil forms" (Moyal 1975, 1976).
Owen, over the next 40 years, made Australian and New Zealand vertebrate palaeontology his own domain. In this he was aided by many resident Australians who sent him material. Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt provided and helped describe bones from southern Queensland in 1844. W. B. Clarke and S. Stutchbury recovered bones in their northern surveys from the Darling Downs of Queensland as well as closer to home near Sydney. F. McCoy and G. Krefft, likewise, provided specimens that came to their attention as the officials in charge of the National Museum of Victoria and the Australian Museum. Local pastoralists in digging wells or in surveying property came upon and then sent material to the youthful Australian Museum, and often these treasures eventually made their way to Owen's desk. Although much of his Australian work centred on fossil marsupials, Owen also took a keen interest in other vertebrates as well, and he produced a prodigious number of papers.
Other foreign experts included Darwin's "bulldog," T. H. Huxley (1862), Gervais (1848- 1852), Hochstetter (1859), and R. Lydekker (1887, 1896), among others. None of these workers, however, published as prolifically on Australian fossil vertebrates as Owen. Because of his prodigious publication record, a few, but only a few, mistakes crept into his work, such as his description of an elephant (supposedly a mastodont) from Australia. Many people (Leichhardt 1855, Falconer 1863) questioned the authenticity of the elephant record in Australia, and it has been suggested that the specimen probably entered as a trade item. After the challenge by Falconer, Owen quietly abandoned his claim (Dugan 1980).
Such early collections’ of fossil vertebrates from Australia had some effect on European science, especially the rich discoveries at Wellington caves. Even though the majority of the material was described by Owen, who disagreed with Darwin on the mechanism that formed new species, natural selection, according to Dugan (1980), the Wellington fossils favoured Darwin's ideas. Dugan suggested that the Law of Succession was formulated in part based on the types of fossils that occurred in the Wellington collections. This law states that fossil animals in any particular geographic area are 'succeeded’ by other animals that are closely related to them, no matter what the environmental conditions. Owen in his own writings claims to have formulated this law (D. Ride, pers. comm.) and it gave no support to the special creationists of the time, who had suggested that certain animals were "created" to be perfectly suited to their environment, and that if such environmental conditions were present, then certain predictable kinds of animals should be there too. Thus, one would expect the same kinds of animals in the tropical regions of Australia and Africa. Mitchell noted the effect the Wellington discoveries had on certain creationists: "I understand Buckland's nose is put completely out of joint by the bones from Australia, their not being those of lions and hyenas
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 9
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Figure 5. Plate from T. L. Mitchell (1838) illustrating the first Australian vertebrate fossils reported in a scientific publication. (Courtesy of E. B. Joyce).
10 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
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Figure 6. Sir Richard Owen as a young man (A) and near the end of his career (B, C). He is often associated with the New Zealand moas (A, B), a group he described prodigiously, almost single-handedly. The outstanding comparative anatomist of the day, he became the authority on the fossil vertebrates of New Zealand and Australia, describing the first material that was collected by Mitchell and Ranken in the Wellington Valley. (Courtesy of the British Museum (Natural History), London).
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 11
is, I find, a fact which is considered in England to entirely upset his theory. And I have now heard from the best authority that their fossil bones belonging to animals similar to those now existing has worked a great change in all their learned speculating on such subjects at home." (Ranken 1916) Buckland, in fact, later did modify, and finally abandon his original ideas on this issue (Vallance 1975; Ride, pers. comm.).
Despite the dominance of foreign experts during this period, it was also at this early stage that the first native born (in Parramatta) Australian began to study vertebrate fossils systematically - the naturalist Edmund Charles Hobson (1814-1848) (Vallance 1978). Hobson, a founding member of the Tasmanian Society, had studied under Sir Richard Owen and established a medical practice in 1838 in Hobart, but subsequently, for reasons of health, moved to the Port Phillip district in 1840 (Gunn 1848a). An early death at the age of 34 ended a highly active mind that investigated animal and human physiology, geology and vertebrate palaeontology (Hobson 1841la-b, 1845a-c, 1846a-b, 1847a-f, 1848a-b). His last paper, published posthumously, was one on a vertebrate fossil, a Diprotodon jaw. Hobson's wife (nee Adamson) was also a keen naturalist and sketched the specimens figured in the two plates of Hobson (1845c). Her sketches were used by the accomplished lithographer, Thomas Ham, to produce the final plates. She also discovered the first trilobite recorded from rocks (Silurian) of the Melbourne district, identified by Gunn (1848b) as probably Asaphus. Until much later, she is the only woman who is recorded to have had any association with the field of vertebrate palaeontology in this country.
GOLD RUSHES, MUSEUMS, AND SYDNEY GENTRY, BEGINNINGS OF A HOME-BASED SCIENCE
Throughout the latter part of the 19th century and well into the 20th, vertebrate palaeontology in Australia was in the process of establishing a home base here. The transition from Basalla's stage 1, where Australia provided only the grist, the data for the European intellectual mills, to stage 2, where although still colonial in aspect, the local scientific community was becoming steadily more independent, occurred during this period. It was a gradual transition, and no clear boundaries can be drawn at any one time.
Certainly the increasing independence must be related to the increasing population size and its concentration in growing urban centres such as Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart. It also must be tied to the increasing wealth that accumulated in these communities, especially that generated by the discovery and mining of gold in several parts of Australia, notably in the area north of Melbourne. Not only was there an incentive to excavate, which in itself led to the discovery of fossils, but the economic necessity, which brought about the establishment of the first state geological survey, whose job it was to document the rock record in the gold bearing regions. Coincident with this, the settling of the interior led to the discovery of bones on a number of sheep and cattle runs as wells were excavated or when drovers reported exposed fossils as they traversed the countryside behind their slow moving herds.
With the opening up of the interior and the mining boom of the mid-19th century, several members of the European scientific community took up temporary or even permanent residence in Australia. Two men from this period stand out in the move towards an independent palaeontological community, Ralph Tate in Adelaide and Robert Etheridge in Sydney. Both were determined advocates of Australian science standing on its own. Both firmly believed in cooperation as equals with foreign experts, neither serving them nor foolishly ignoring them.
12 - RICH & ARCHBOLD GOLD AND BEGINNINGS OF THE STATE SURVEYS
The discovery of gold, mainly in Australia's southeast provided the first major economic incentive that affected the course of palaeontology. The first of Australia's geological surveys, the Victorian Colonial Survey was established in 1852, with A. R. C. Selwyn (1824-1902) as its director (Dunn 1910, Darragh 1987). Selwyn's directive was to document the geology of the gold-bearing regions, probably in the hope that such work would allow prediction of further producing goldfields. Selwyn had been trained by some of the most prominent geologists in Britain and, thus, was well prepared for the task of recording the stratigraphic succession, almost unknown in Australia at this time. When he assumed his duties as Director the most authoratative summary of geology of Australia was Jukes’ A Sketch of the Physical Structure of Australia, So Far As It Is At Present Known published in 1850 by T. & W. Boone in London. This small text shows how general the knowledge of geology was at the time and how restricted to the margins of the continent it was. Selwyn and his team of geologists added much to the detail of southeastern Australian geology by preparing well over three score of detailed maps of present day Victoria before political controversy managed to bring about the dissolution of the Survey for a while. In the meantime, Selwyn's survey was able to locally carry out and publish its own scientific results and to locally train a number of geologists, who later served to set up other surveys and institutions in Australia. Following the establishment of the Victorian survey, all other states followed suit by 1890, and these institutions served to foster collection and storage of fossils, some of which were vertebrates.
REPOSITORIES OF FOSSIL OBJECTS: THE FIRST MUSEUMS
Repositories of fossil objects had been established in Australia even before the state surveys, and these, together with the surveys served as a growing resource for comparison in the latter part of the 19th century (Kohistedt 1983). Since the early voyages to Australia by the French and British, and even before them the Dutch, considerable British and European interest in Australian natural history specimens had led to a lively trade in Australian oddments, both for scientific and commercial reasons. Respectable collections of Australian specimens accumulated in London, as well as in European museums, at first through the efforts of such men as Sir Joseph Banks and Robert Brown. As a result, these museums, especially the British Museum (Natural History) came to own many of the type specimens of the newly discovered natural curiosities.
The pattern began to change, however, with the arrival in Sydney of Alexander Macleay in 1826. Macleay was sent as Colonial Secretary to the Government of New South Wales, a position he held for the next decade. With him, from Europe, came a fine library and a fine insect collection, amongst the best known anywhere at the time. Interestingly, Macleay's own son and his nephew, both with the name of William, were to add to Alexander's collections and perpetuate the family's support of science in Australia (Fletcher 1920, Stanbury 1975).
William Julian, the nephew, expanded the family's personal museum in the Elizabeth Bay residence (after both Alexander and William Sharp Macleay had died) in part by importing specimens from abroad. His wish was to possess a truly international collection, not just a local one. Macleay went so far as to hire a curator, George Masters, out of his own funds. He also continued the tradition of the Macleay's for serving as an intellectual hub in the community by giving "whisky parties" (actually scientific gatherings around the drink) for staff from the University of Sydney, as well as interested personages - explorers, doctors, visiting scientists, amongst others. This undoubtedly led to his offering in December 1873 to bequeath
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 13
his museum to the University of Sydney including a salary of 6,000 pounds to pay for curation.
At the time Alexander Macleay stepped ashore in Sydney town a museum of sorts already existed there. This consisted of a small room in the Colonial Secretary's Office, initially set up by the colony's first scientific society, the Philosophical Society of Australasia (Branagan & Townley 1976). In the beginning each of the seven members of the society paid 5 pounds to have the collection organized and for the purchase of books. Major Goulburn provided the single room that constituted the museum. Australian specimens were put on display, but perhaps more important than that, such a museum allowed establishment of official contacts with foreign museums, which in turn encouraged the exchange of specimens between this and foreign institutions. The flow of scientific material was now in both directions, not just from Australia to the colonial powers.
To this infant museum Macleay added his own collections and together with his enthusiasm, the foundations of the Australian Museum were established. Naturally, this first museum became a storehouse for antipodean specimens and gradually encouraged more and more residents to retain material in Australia as well as to be more observant of their native fauna. It was quite amazing that a museum was able to exist at all at this time. The Sydney colony was "a convict settlement.....racked with dissention between free immigrants and emancipists, businessmen and farmers, army and government, colony and colonial office... an environment conducive [only] to.....activities [such as] those directed to individual survival and aggrandisement" (Strahan 1979). In this milieu, science, even that part devoted to palaeontology, had its beginnings.
When the Philosophical Society first set up its museum, Sydney was still small, with a population approaching 20,000. Yet, by 1837, this tiny museum had public hours each Tuesday and Friday from 11 am to 4 pm and contained exhibits of native fauna and flora including more than 300 species of birds (Fletcher 1920). Also present in the collections were ethnological and geological specimens, and by 1832 the government was providing 200 pounds annually - a beginning.
The Australian Museum was Australia's first museum, but soon others followed. The National Museum of Victoria, now the Museum of Victoria, was set up in Melbourne in 1854 (Pescott 1954). Two thousand pounds were set aside by the Victorian government in 1854 for the fledgling National Museum, and by March 1854 Captain Andrew Clarke, who was instrumental in the initial stages of this museum, saw to it that two rooms were set aside above his offices at the old Assay Office in Latrobe Street (Fig. 7), just west of what was to become a more permanent site. The first staff appointment was made on April 1, 1854, William Blandowski, whose personality eventually led to considerable conflict with the council that oversaw the museum and the newly appointed Frederick McCoy as Director (in 1858). Blandowski energetically mounted a number of expeditions, which greatly expanded the museum's holdings, and interestingly engaged such people as Gerard Krefft, who was later to assume a curatorship in the Australian Museum. Blandowski finally resigned, and McCoy took over the reins of power. It was McCoy who determinedly built up the Museum collections and expanded the original facilities. He orchestrated and oversaw the removal of the museum from the Assay office to a new site on the campus of the University of Melbourne (Fig. 8), which was described in a poem published in the Melbourne Punch (Pescott 1954):
THE RAID ON THE MUSEUM
There was a little man, And he had a little plan, The public of their specimens to rob, rob, rob,
14 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
So he got a horse and dray, And he carted them away, And chuckled with enjoyment of the job, job, job.
Blandowski's pickled ‘possums
And Mueller's leaves and blossoms,
Bugs, butterflies, and beetles stuck on pins, pins, pins, Light and heavy, great and small,
He abstracted one and all -
May we never have to answer for such sins, sins, sins.
There were six foot kangaroos,
Native bears and cockatoos
That would make a taxidermist jump for joy, joy, joy. And if you want to know
Who took them you should go
And should seek information from McCoy, Coy, Coy.
When one's living far away,
Up the country I dare say,
It's very nice to have such things at hand, hand, hand, Yet it don't become professors,
When they become possessors,
Of property by methods contraband, band, band.
The collections were to remain at the University of Melbourne until 1899, when shortly after McCoy's death they were moved again to the present site of the Museum of Victoria on Russell Street (Fig. 9).
Other museums followed as well: the Queensland Museum in Brisbane in 1855 (Mack 1956), the South Australian Museum in Adelaide in 1856 (Hale 1956), and the Tasmanian Museum (Hobart), the Queen Victoria Museum (Launceston), the Western Australian Museum (Perth), and finally the Northern Territory Museum (Darwin and Alice Springs). In addition to these governmentally sponsored institutions, several private museums, such as the Kyancutta Museum in South Australia, were managed with private funding. Many of the private collections were later incorporated into state and federal museums, either by direct donation or purchase. Although not without political intrigue and funding difficulties (Kohlstedt 1983), museums did continue to expand into the 20th century. But they were no longer simply places for storage of Australia's heritage, its natural wonders and antiquities. They also became centres for public education, research and exchange of ideas, all in an Australian setting. The museums and those associated with them, likewise, became the source of personnel and
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 15
funding that sponsored locally based expeditions, such as Macleay organized and financed to northern Australia and New Guinea in 1875 (Stanbury 1975).
SS
Figure 7. The Crown Lands Building, the original National Museum (now the Museum of Victoria) was located in the assay section of this building from 1854 to 1856. (From the //lustrated Melbourne News 1858, courtesy of the Museum of Victoria).
BEGINNINGS OF INDEPENDENT TRAINING: THE UNIVERSITIES
Universities generally developed slightly later than the surveys and museums, but they played a major role in establishing the independence of science in Australia. Frederick McCoy (1818-1899) (Fig. 9), a major force in the founding of the National Museum of Victoria, also was the Professor of Natural Science at the University of Melbourne from 1854 to 1899. He was particularly interested in palaeontology and worked occasionally on vertebrate fossils, although invertebrates were his main research subjects. During the forty years he led an active scientific life in Melbourne, he ruled over it with an autocratic air (Branagan & Lim 1984) and because of this attracted few students. T. S. Hall (1858-1915) (Fig. 10) was an exception to this rule, an exception partly enhanced by his ability to get along with McCoy, despite the fact that he well might disagree with him on a number of issues (Robin 1987). Hall had hoped he would be offered the Chair of Geology when McCoy was gone, but it instead was offered to John Walter Gregory, an import from Scotland.
J.W. Gregory (1864-1932), a remarkable "international" geologist, succeeded McCoy in December 1900 as Professor of Geology, carrying on with the interest of the University of Melbourne in palaeontology (Fig. 11). Gregory, who began his career as a palaeontological assistant in the British Museum (Anonymous 1932), was interested in popularizing geology and teaching it as a practical subject, very unlike McCoy. A great organizer, Gregory led a group of Melbourne University students on camels into the Lake Eyre Basin during the summer of 1901-1902. On that expedition he discovered a remarkable fossil field, mainly along Cooper Creek. The account of this early vertebrate palaeontological expedition appears
16 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
8. The National Museum of Victoria with headquarters on the University of Melbourne campus, with
Figure
(Courtesy of the Museum of Victoria).
external and internal views.
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 17
Figure 9. The move of the National Museum of Victoria from its university address to that on Russell Street, where it is located today as the Museum of Victoria. Sir Frederick McCoy (as a young man, and as a
mature scientist) was responsible for the growth of this museum as well as the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. (Courtesy of the Museum of Victoria).
18 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
Figure 10. Nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian palaeontologists. A, E. C. Stirling, Honourary Director of the South Australian Museum from 1889 to 1914. He was involved in the excavation and later monographing of a variety of vertebrate fossils recovered from Lake Callabonna in South Australia. B, A. H. C. Zietz, Assistant Director of the South Australian Museum from 1888 to 1909. Like Stirling, he excavated at Lake Callabonna and coauthored many papers with him on the discoveries there. (Courtesy of the South Australian Museum and N. Pledge). C, T. S. Hall, Frederick McCoy's student at the University of Melbourne was the first locally-trained palaeontologist in Australia. His specialty was invertebrate palaeontology, but he found time to work on fossil whales as well. D, Frederick Chapman, primarily interested in invertebrate palaeontology, mainly of Victoria, published a few papers in the early part of the twentieth century on fossil vertebrates. (Courtesy of the Museum of Victoria).
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 19
Figure 11. J. W. Gregory, as a young man (C, D) and as older explorer (A, B). Gregory was responsible for the discovery of Pleistocene fossil vertebrates along Cooper Creek in the Lake Eyre Sub-basin, an area that was later to produce the first concentrations of Tertiary terrestrial vertebrates from the continent. Osmar White's caricature in The Super Roo of Mungalongaloo (D) illustrates how Gregory's expedition into central Australia captured the public interest. (Courtesy of the University of Glasgow (A, B), Mrs. C. Gregory, and J. Hook (D)).
20 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
in his Dead Heart of Australia published in 1906 in London, as well as in a number of local newspapers including the Melbourne Age (Fig. 12). It was not until half a century later that the full potential of this area was recognized when R. A. Stirton (see detail in account by R. H. Tedford, this volume) followed in some of Gregory's footsteps. Stirton not only relocated many of Gregory's Pleistocene locales, but he discovered the first concentrations of Tertiary terrestrial vertebrates ever found on this continent.
Gregory was not only associated with the university system but also simultaneously served as Director of the Geological Survey in the Mines Department of Victoria (from 1901), demonstrating the often repeated pattern in Australia's early history of geology of a single person serving concurrently in several institutions (such as museums, surveys, universities). He also became involved in the Victorian Chamber of Mines and was on the council of the Australian Institute of Mining Engineers (now the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy) as well as an office-holder in the Royal Society of Victoria (Branagan & Lim 1984). Even more than this, he became involved in presenting extension courses, in addition to his already heavy load of university courses, and was interested in both primary and secondary education. This was, in part, a reflection of how small the scientific community was, and how talented people had to carry many different responsibilities. Gregory was an extremely energetic man, which probably helped immensely to manage two such jobs. George (1975) described this restless energy: "By repute he [Gregory] could at any one time nurse his infant on his knee, correct the proofs of one book with his left hand while writing another with his right, and dominate a polemical discussion on any topic." Gregory, despite seemingly boundless reserves, finally resigned his post at the university in despair in June of 1904 because of his inability to extract enough funding from the government to operate effectively. Ironically, only a few months later, in September, the same month he returned to Scotland (where he took the Chair of Geology at the University of Glasgow), the funding became available, unfortunately, too late. Gregory continued his expeditionary work in many parts of the world until he drowned on an expedition to the Amazon Basin in 1932. Appropriately and ironically Gregory had copied a poem on the fly-leaf of the first of his Peruvian notebooks:
"I wander'd till I died.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill. Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side."
Alexander M. Thompson, who occupied the Chair of Geology at the University of Sydney from 1866, had sufficient interest in fossil vertebrates to spend a considerable time in the caves in the Wellington area. This obsession most likely hastened his early death in the 1870's shortly after an expedition to the caves with Gerard Krefft (Branagan & Townley 1976).
Another university personage of marked significance to palaeontology in Australia was Ralph Tate (1840-1901). He arrived from England to take up the foundation chair in geology at the newly founded University of Adelaide in 1874. Tate taught palaeontology with an infectious enthusiasm and an open mind and lured his students and volunteers into the field by packing a keg of beer as part of the field gear (Alderman 1967, Vallance 1978)! His research was careful, abundantly published and of good quality (e.g. Tate 1893), and his production of good students was unrivalled at the time. Besides his charisma, Tate also held the view that the Australian record should be viewed as separate and independent from that elsewhere and "had little but scorn for those he thought believed all the rules of geology were written in Europe. "Sir F. McCoy appears to object to any Australian deposits being called Eocene unless the fossil species are identical with those occurring in the London Clay, Paris Basin, and other European Eocenes, peculiar Australian species being open to grave suspicion." Tate is remembered as one of the first Australian palaeontologists, who was not always looking over
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 21
140 Sketch map of! the
LAKE EYRE BASIN
Showing the route of the Lake Eyre Expedition 1901-2.
Miles A — A - —-—-. ——— A ° 10 20 30 : fioule aia 4:3) b, ————— Great. Northern Railway of South Australia —— Titres of Sard) Drrves. ooo cee cose cece nea
The map ts based on the Pastoral Plans of the Surveyor General of South Australia, The outhnes of the Desert
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Figure 12. Map of the Lake Eyre re di in the early twentieth century. Gregory discovered many vertebrate fossil-bearing localities along many of the creeks draining into Lake Eyre. (From Gregory 1906).
22 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
his shoulder for advice from abroad or trying to shove the Australian record into a European mould (Vallance 1978).
The universities provided permanent, indigenous positions for professional palaeontolgists, and the first Australian-educated students began to appear. T. S. Hall, who was trained by F. McCoy and worked with the Victorian Geological Survey under Selwyn, was the first of many. Although locally-trained vertebrate palaeontologists did not appear until the twentieth century in Australia, palaeontology by then had its independence. For the sub-discipline of vertebrate palaeontology, Australian maturity was deferred, mainly due to the lack of a trained professional base in this country and the absence of financial support for their work.
RAPID COMMUNICATION ON A LOCAL SCALE: THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES
Yet one other factor which gave independence of scientific endeavour in Australia (Branagan and Townley 1976) was the establishment of local scientific societies (Prince 1979). Patterned after groups such as the Royal Society of London, these societies gave the educated gentry a chance to exchange information at meetings and perhaps, more importantly, to give local scientists a rapid, local source of publication. One of the earliest of the societial publications was the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science, Agriculture, Statistics &c published by the Tasmanian Society for the Advancement of Natural Science or The Tasmanian Society, as it came to be known, a society that was founded in 1839 and flourished under the leadership of Sir John Franklin (Plomley 1969). The Tasmanian Journal, first published in 1841, continued into the 1840's (Fig. 13).
MEN OF INFLUENCE, PIONEERS IN AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY
During the transition period from dependence to independence, Basalla's stages 1 and 3, a number of scientists, collectors and interested individuals substantially influenced the course of vertebrate palaeontology in Australia. These included the Rev. William B. Clarke, Alexander Macleay, Edmund C. Hobson, the Rev. Julian Tenison Woods, Frederick McCoy, Gerard Krefft, Robert Etheridge Jr., H. Y. L Brown, Charles W. DeVis, E. C. Stirling, A. H. C. Zietz and J. W. Gregory, to mention but a few.
1839 marked the arrival of the Reverend W. B. Clarke (1798-1878) in Sydney, migrating with his family to Australia because of his own ill health. Here he assumed the position as Rector of Willoughby, North Sydney after coming from a background of study at Cambridge University. He had been very much influenced by Adam Sedgwick, Professor of Geology at Cambridge University. Clarke maintained a close friendship with Sedgwick throughout his life (Branagan in Stanbury 1975). On coming to Australia, Clarke was an avid prospector for fossils and a keen geologist and took every opportunity to show visiting scientists the local rocks of the Sydney area. He had an ongoing correspondence with many well-known geologists such as Murchison and Sedgwick in England and Dana in the United States. He certainly did not work in an isolated atmosphere. He managed to do more than just collect and serve as a geological tour guide; he also published a number of articles in the local newspapers and in both Australian and overseas journals, especially on the geological record of the Sydney environs (Branagan & Townley 1976). He drew together many of his geological and palaeontological ideas and the results of several survey trips in The Sedimentary Formations of New South Wales, which appeared in several editions between 1867 and 1878. Despite this
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 23
THE
TASMANIAN JOURNAL
Oo;
NATURAL SCIENCE, AGRICULTURE, STATISTICS, &e.
VOL. I.
TASMANIA:
TAMES BARNARD, GOVERNMENT PRINTER, HOBART.
LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREEP.
1842. Royal SocieTY OF TATMANIA Figure 13. The front page of the initial issue of the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science, Agriculture,
Statistics, &c. , an early locally produced scientific journal that made it possible for local, rapid publication of scientific papers. (Courtesy of N. Kemp).
24 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
effort on his part, however, most of the vertebrate fossil material that he collected or that was sent to him was forwarded to scientists abroad for final study.
A part of the same Sydney community to which Clarke belonged was Alexander Macleay (1767-1848), already mentioned above in the context of museum development. His large house at Elizabeth Bay with its exquisite library, by far the best palaeontological library in Australia at the time, plus his natural history collections, certainly served as an intellectual hub of this colonial town. But, although he wrote articles for the local newspapers about fossils, he published no substantial scientific papers. His contribution was primarily that of a great resource on which the infant scientific community could build.
It was certainly no easy task to foster or pursue science in a society that was small, nearly half unlettered convicts and cut off from rapid communication with other centres of scientific endeavour in Europe and England. Scientific efforts were restricted to a small group of educated men who had both the training and the means of support to keep themselves going.
Julian Tenison Woods (1832-1889) was another early worker on vertebrate fossils (Fig. 14). A Roman Catholic priest-geologist, he led a varied and somewhat controversial life that took him from England to Australia to Europe and Asia (including China) and back to Australia where he died (Press 1979). He spent much of his time in Australia in the area around Penola, to the southeast of Adelaide. He collected in the mid to late Cainozoic deposits in this area and wrote a number of scientific papers based on the material that he had collected, or had collected for him, such as the large bird bones from native wells around Penola, some of the first dromornithids reported. He maintained an active correspondence with geological enthusiasts (Player 1983) as well as other palaeontologists and geologists in Australia, such as William Macleay (Press 1979) and overseas, such as Sir Charles Lyell, one of the most prominent geologists of the time. He was also an active member, even president (Linnean Society of New South Wales from 1879-1880), of several scientific societies and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Australian Museum (1880). He used what few chances there were for intellectual pursuits within his parish when he stopped for a while on properties such as that of Samuel Pratt-Winter at Murndel near Hamilton, Victoria. Murndel was ideal for Woods, as it combined an abundance of Miocene fossils (marine), a superb library and a well educated and well travelled land-owner (Press 1979). Even though Pratt-Winter was not a Roman Catholic, he would travel to Tenison Woods presbytery in Penola, when going to Mt Gambier, and often would bring books for the priest to read in his absence from Murndel. Woods certainly didn't confine his explorations to southeastern Australia, but made a number of excursions to several parts of the continent, for both scientific and religious reasons. He visited Malaysia and China, and, of course, he spent his early life in England. Despite the fact that Woods described and named many of the fossils that he collected, however, he often forwarded specimens to Melbourne or to London to the experts for a final decision. He oft times used such specimens as trade items with other workers such as Macleay in Sydney.
A major influence in South Australia was H. Y. L. Brown (1844-1924), a Nova Scotian who received his training initially at the Royal School of Mines in London (Fig. 15). He worked for a time in both Canada and New Zealand. He trained under Selwyn in the Victorian survey. He spent time in New South Wales before taking a job in 1882 as the government geologist of South Australia. He held that job for 30 years and used all manner of transport to cover much of South Australia and the Northern Territory (then a part of South Australia) in his geological surveys. He was a man of catholic tastes, and his reports and maps (Fig. 16) detailed not only the geology but also water resources, local environment, distribution of fauna and flora, and ethnology of each area he visited.
Brown (1892, 1894) collected the remains of Diprotodon, a giant, now extinct marsupial, and the giant goanna, Megalania, as well as a number of other bones in the area northeast of Lake Eyre. He noted that the native peoples of this area accounted for the presence of such
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 25
B
Figure 14. Julian Tenison (J. E. T.) Woods as a young priest in South Australia (A) and a traveller (B) in southeast Asia. He was an important early collector and writer on the geology and palaeontology of southeastem Australia. (From Press 1979).
bones by their being remains of the cadimurka , a large fish that lived in the bottom of the waterholes in the area. These cadimurka had never been seen alive by anyone, however.
Simultaneous with Brown's work in central Australia was the first major expedition collecting vertebrate fossils, that at Lake Callabonna carried out by the South Australian Museum (Figs 17, 18). Brown (1894) reported on this expedition. H. Hurst was originally sent to Lake Callabonna by the South Australian Museum after an Aboriginal stockman pointed out the occurrence of giant bones on the lake's surface. Parts of 80 skeletons of large, extinct vertebrates, mainly Diprotodon, were discovered by Hurst, and later by E. C. Stirling & A. H. C. Zietz (Fig. 10) and others from the South Australian Museum who took over from Hurst. Brown's report on the area (dated 27 June 1893) astutely recognized the importance of this site: "In view of the importance of preserving these relics of a bygone age for the future scientific exploration I would recommend that the whole area of the lake be reserved for that purpose, and to prevent the indiscriminate digging up and removal of portions of the specimens." This recommendation was implemented on 30 November 1901 by the South Australian government.
In the late 19th century two scientists with palaeontological interests stand out as independent workers who did not automatically seek foreign expert opinion to give credence to their own ideas. These were Johann Ludwig Gerhard Krefft (1830-1881) and Robert Etheridge Jr. (1847-1920) of the Australian Museum, Sydney. Both men strongly believed in their own ability to make reliable decisions without outside confirmation. Etheridge was an imaginative and careful scientist and together with Ralph Tate supported the idea that the Australian stratigraphic sequences might not be a direct reflection of those in the Northern Hemisphere.
26 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
Figure 15. H. Y. L. Brown (A, B younger, and C, older) was responsible for the discovery of much fossil vertebrate material from the interior of the continent, mainly South Australia and the Northern Territory. (Courtesy of the South Australian Archives, Adelaide, and N. Pledge).
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 27
MAP
TO ACCOMPANY
GOVERNMENT GEOLOGISTS REPORT On country in the neighbourhood of do
. LAKE EYRE | a . . fy
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Recent 4 Tertiary on Mesozvce
(Cretaceous 4 Ooltac)
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AY L.Brown, Govt Geologist. 11 10.92
SURVEYOR CENERALS OFFICE ADELAIDE A Viughan hotel thographer PP NO /4/.\
Figure 16. Map of the Lake Eyre Sub-basin prepared by H. Y. L. Brown, then the Government Geologist for South Australia. This area was rich in fossil vertebrates, many of which were discovered by Brown. (Courtesy of the National Library of Australia and G. F. van Tets).
Krefft is often remembered for his public disagreement with Sir Richard Owen over the feeding habits of the fossil marsupial Thylacoleo, clearly demonstrating his belief in the value of his own opinion. Krefft had sent Owen material for study for some time, but he rather unfortunately stopped this when Owen interpreted the jaws and teeth of Thylacoleo as belonging to a carnivorous animal. Krefft adamantly and rather unscientifically disagreed,
28 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
claiming that the beast was a plant-eater, something like a giant rat kangaroo. Krefft remained, throughout his life, an outspoken defender of his own, independent opinions. He is best known for his work on fossil mammals, but he worked on a number of other vertebrates as well (e.g. Whitley 1958-1959, 1967-1968; Krefft 1866, 1870, 1873; Archer & Clayton 1984).
Robert Etheridge Jr. first came to Australia to be a part of Selwyn's geological survey. Although he returned to England after his service in the survey, he was drawn back to Australia by an abiding interest in this new country, and was important in establishing the science of vertebrate palaeontology on this continent. He served as a palaeontologist at the Australian Museum and as well as a palaeontologist with the Geological Survey of New South Wales (Strahan 1979) and was eventually appointed as Director of the Australian Museum in 1887, where he remained until 1919. During that time he worked on fossils from all parts of Australia and had close working links with other geological survey personnel, such as H. Y. L Brown. He was "aloof, rather dour ...and shared his enthusiasms with few, though so many profited by them" (Vallance 1978). He had an incredible capacity for work, and his publication record was impressive (more than 400 papers) (e.g. Etheridge 1878, 1918; Etheridge & Jack 1882, Jack & Etheridge 1892, Dun & Rainbow 1926). Even more impressive was the accuracy of his assessments in those papers. His careful scientific work has stood the test of time. "Etheridge's writings, like Tate's, betray a well-informed sense of historical scholarship" (Vallance 1978), and together with Tate, Etheridge set the stage for independence in Australian palaeontology.
E. C. Stirling and A. H. C. Zietz (Fig. 10), based at the South Australian Museum, are perhaps most remembered in vertebrate palaeontology for their excavations at Lake Callabonna in South Australia (Figs. 17, 18). Fossil bones were originally discovered at Lake Callabonna by an Aboriginal stockman (?Jackie Nolan) who reported them to Mr. F. B. Ragless. Two days later Mr. Ragless visited the site. A few days later the station cook also visited the site, and knowing that there was a reward posted for the recovery of the feet of Diprotodon, took the bones to Adelaide to claim the reward. Because of the confusion concerning just who should receive the reward, no one ever did! At this point the South Australian Museum dispatched Mr. H. Hurst to investigate the discovery in January 1893. After four months of field work a considerable amount of material was returned by "buck- board" buggy by Hurst (Stirling & Zietz 1900). After evaluation of the Hurst work, Stirling and Zietz decided to return themselves to Callabonna in August of 1893 and Hurst resigned his appointment upon their arrival. Despite appalling field conditions including bogged camels, the difficulty of acquiring feed and firewood, rabbit plagues, illness and high temperatures, a major part of the world's largest collection of Diprotodon skeletons was recovered and subsequently transported to the South Australian Museum in Adelaide.
One of the first excavations of its kind, where whole animals were being recovered in numbers, Lake Callabonna gave Australia's small population and that of the world a glimpse of what the entire skeleton of such animals as the giant marsupial Diprotodon (Fig. 18) and the massive bird Genyornis really looked like. In other localities known up to that time skeletons were disarticulated, not associated, because of the jumbling that occurred in caves, stream channels, and even swamp accumulations. Stirling and Zietz were not simply field collectors, but also studied and published on what they had found, producing a series of excellent, large format, well illustrated monographs on a variety of the Callabonna vertebrates (Stirling & Zietz 1896a, 1896b, 1900, 1905, 1913). Sir Richard Owen, who had toiled so long and hard on understanding Diprotodon, would have envied such work, or would perhaps have done the work himself had he the chance. Ironically, Owen died in 1892, the very year that bones were discovered at Lake Callabonna and never knew what the feet of his treasured Diprotodon looked like. Callabonna held the secret that Owen would never know.
Another late nineteenth century vertebrate palaeontologist was Charles de Vis (1829-1915) (De Vis's name is variously spelled DeVis and deVis). He differed from Gregory, Brown,
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 29
Figure 17. Lake Callabonna, South Australia (above) and skeleton of a Diprotodon weathering out on the surface of the lake during the South Australian Museum's expedition to this area in the late nineteenth century. (From Stirling and Zietz 1913).
30 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
Figure 18. Lake Callabonna, skeleton of a Diprotodon partially excavated (above) and fully prepared and mounted (below). These specimens were recovered by the South Australian Museum's expedition in the late nineteenth century led by Hurst initially and then later by Stirling and Zietz.
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 31
Stirling and Zietz in that he did little field collecting himself. Instead, he worked on the collections made by others, such as Brown and Gregory. His origins lay in Manchester and he worked at many jobs upon coming to Australia, including being a librarian in Rockhampton for some time. He often published articles in local newspapers, such as The Brisbane Courier, The Telegraph and The Queenslander) under a pseudonym, Thickthorn (Ingram 1986), Later he assumed a curatorship at the Queensland Museum, and there he published profusely, naming many new forms, primarily from late Tertiary and Quaternary deposits. His comparative collections were exceedingly small, and his communication with the remaining scientific world was hampered by distance. Primarily because of this, and his lack of understanding of variability within species, most of the material he described was set up as new, and presently extinct species. He seems also to have believed that all fossil forms must represent extinct species. Thus, many of the original deVis names have been found to be invalid, the species instead representing fossil remains of extant taxa. In fairness to de Vis, however, it is worth remembering the isolation in which he worked, and the minimal funds and the small comparative collections with which he dealt. Besides his scientific work, de Vis made a significant contribution to museums serving as educational institutions based on his experience in Britain (Kohlstedt ms.).
As well as full-time professionals, a variety of other part-time vertebrate palaeontologists were important . Robert Broom (1866-1951) serves as an example. Probably best known for his work on australopithecines in South Africa, he also spent a time as a medical practitioner in Australia. He arrived in Sydney on 28 May 1892 (Hunt 1974), and spent four years on the continent. He spent the greatest time in Taralga, New South Wales as the town's doctor, but found enough time to collect fossil vertebrates from the Wombeyan caves, despite some resistance from the New South Wales government. Some of this material eventually was deposited in the Australian Museum, but the vast majority of it followed him overseas when he returned to Glasgow, perhaps in part because of the resistance of officialdom to his work in the caves of New South Wales, and perhaps due to a somewhat cool reception that he received at times from Etheridge.
By the beginning of the 20th century Australian-based vertebrate palaeontologists were collecting, describing and thinking about Australian fossils. They were no longer automatically shipping them overseas. But, there was still little funding for this science, either for collection and study or for the hiring of professional vertebrate palaeontologists in permanent positions. As a result, students were not being trained in this discipline on this continent, and little expeditionary work was mounted locally.
AUSTRALIAN INDEPENDENCE AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
Vertebrate palaeontology in Australia has seen decided expansion during the 20th century, especially since the 1950's. The greatest activity has occurred in the study of fossil fish and mammals. Both of these disciplines have provided biostratigraphic information very useful in establishing rock sequences in the deformed Devonian sediments in eastern Australia as well as in the flat-lying, monotonous Tertiary carbonate-rich channel deposits that mimic the underlying Cambrian marine limestones in northern Australia.
32 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
4 eit se Bn ealliaaet as : se all i . oo
Figure 19. The early 1950's saw the discovery of concentrations of Tertiary marsupials in northem South Australia. This discovery was the result of joint expeditions of the University of California (Berkeley) and the South Australian Museum. Three individuals were instrumental in these discoveries: R. A. Stirton (above, right) from the University of California, P. Lawson (above, left) from the South Australian Museum arid R. H. Tedford (below) from the University of Califomia. R. H. Tedford presents a detailed account of this pioneering work in his chapter in this volume. (Courtesy of P. Lawson).
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 33
EXPLO ig 4 ce MUSEU mS oe r
Figure 20. International cooperation of the National Museum of Victoria and the Denver Museum in a joint expedition to the Nullarbor. Edmund Gill, a vertebrate palaeontologist from the Victorian museum (fourth from right), was a prominent member of the expedition. (Courtesy of the Museum of Victoria).
During this period, advancement has been greatly influenced and enhanced by a few energetic workers and the discovery of important new fossil fields (see also Tedford (Chap. 2) and Plane (Chap. 3) this volume), It was also during this period that enough information began to accumulate to make meaningful summaries possible (Chapman 1914a, 1914b, Hills 1958, Ride 1964, Rich & Thompson 1982, Archer & Clayton 1984).
Names that stand out amongst the many vertebrate palacontologists who worked or are still working during the twentieth century are E. S. Hills (Aust.), R. A. Stirton (U.S.A.), R. H. Tedford (U.S.A.) (Fig. 19), M. O. Woodburne (U.S.A.), W.D.L. Ride (Aust.), J.A. Mahoney (Aust.), E, D. Gill (Aust.) (Fig. 20) (Gill 1953, 1957, 1965a-b, 1968), E. Lundelius (U.S.A.), W. Turnbull (U.S.A.), M. Archer (Aust.), R. Wells (Aust.), P. Murray (Aust.), T. F. Flannery (Aust.), J. Hope (Aust.), S. Hand (Aust.), N. Pledge (Aust.), J. A. Long (Aust.), T. H. Rich (Aust.), A. Ritchie (Aust.), KS, Campbell (Aust.) S. Turner (Aust.), R. Miles (U.K.), G. Young (Aust.), R. Molnar (Aust.), and T. Thulborn (Aust). All of these scientists contributed significantly in major field discoveries, prolific description of new taxa and in novel interpretation of the newly found material. Hill's (1958) review of the entire field of Australian vertebrate palacontology and Ride's (1964) summary of Australian palacomammalogy were the first real attempts to draw together the rapidly accumulating data. Hills’ as well as Long's, Young's, Campbell's, Ritchie's and Miles’ specialty is Devonian fish, while Stirton, Tedford, Woodburne and their associates finally located the first concentrations of Tertiary mammals in Australia, in the Lake Eyre Basin where H.Y.L. Brown and J. W.
34 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
Gregroy had trekked with camels. Gill, through his enthusiasm as a collector, and his publications, also promoted vertebrate palaecontology, especially in Victoria.
Figure 21. Joint British Museum (Natural History) and Western Australian Museum expedition near the productive sites at Gogo, Wester Australia. (Courtesy of the British Museum (Natural History).
Lundelius and Turnbull together with staff (including Duncan Merrilees) from the Western Australian Museum developed the Pleistocene record of Western Australia as well as the unique Pliocene site of Hamilton in Victoria, one of the few radiometrically dated vertebrate sites in Australia. Stirton and Ride promoted Australian vertebrate palaeontology not only by their own field and research work, but by training a number of students and collaborating with scientists around the world on Australian projects. Current researchers, such as T. H. Rich and M. Archer studied with Stirton and Ride respectively, and they in turn have supervised additional students, for example T.F. Flannery and J.A. Long. The current field of vertebrate palaeontology has much expanded over that of the 1950's. The long list of professionals in this field given in Rich & van Tets (1985) is a reflection of the current level of activity (Fig. 21). Each has made their own unique contribution, from setting up an economically useful microvertebrate biostratigraphy (S. Turner) to collecting and mounting impressive public displays (T. Flannery, A. Ritchie) to guiding museums filled with vertebrate fossils (A. Bartholomai). Activity is by far the highest it has ever been in this field in Australia.
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 35
Figure 22. A joint expedition of the British Museum (Natural History) and the Western Australian Museum led to the discovery in the mid-twentieth century of the rich Devonian Gogo locality in northwestern Wester Australia. (Courtesy of the British Museum (Natural History).
36 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
Figure 23. Meeting of many of the currently practicing vertebrate palaeontologists in Australia at the Conference on Vertebrate Evolution and Systematics held in March 1989 at the Australian Geographic headquarters in Sydney. Front Row (left to right): 1, Groves; 2, Jeanette Muirhead; 3, Rhys Walkley; 4, ?; 5, Corrie Williams; 6, Dietlind Knuth; 7, Coral Gilkeson; 8, Sue Creagh; 9, Anne Warren; 10, Sue Hand. Back Row (left to right): 1, Tony Thulborn; 2, Michael Loy; 3, Zhang Gue Rui; 4, Gavin Young; 5, Robert Jones; 6, Tim Hamley; 7, Susan Bergdolt; 8, Bernie Cooke; 9, Brian Mackness, 10, Miranda Gott; 11, Mike Durant; 12, John Barry; 13, Walter Boles; 14, Neville Pledge; 15, Julie Barry; 16, Arthur White; 17, Alex Ritchie; 18, Jim Lavarack; 19, Mary White; 20, Sue Lavarack; 21, Pat Rich; 22, ?; 23, Tom Rich; 24, 7; 25, John Long; 26, Henk Godthelp; 27, Peter Murray; 28, Paul Willis; 29, Michael Archer; 30, John Scanlon. (Courtesy of Australian Geographic).
Discoveries such as those in the Wellington Valley and at Lake Callabonna stand out as significant in the nineteenth century, when Australian vertebrate palaeontology was just being weaned. Several significant finds mark the twentieth century as well. These finds were made by a variety of people, mainly Americans, Australians and British. Such localities include: Gogo, a number of rich Devonian fish localities on Gogo Station in Western Australia discovered and developed by the British Museum (Natural History) and the Western Australian Museum (Figs 21, 22); the Devonian armoured fish localities in western New South Wales and southeastern Victoria, primarily developed by personnel from the Australian Museum, the Museum of Victoria and Monash and Melbourne universities, Australian National University and the Bureau of Mineral Resources; the Cretaceous terrestrial and marine sequences containing reptiles in southwestern Queensland and Victoria, the former through the efforts of the Queensland Museum, Harvard University, and the British Museum (Natural History) and the latter primarily by the Museum of Victoria and Monash University. The Tertiary vertebrate-bearing clays and sands of the Great Artesian Basin originally discovered and developed by R. A. Stirton and his collegues based at the University of California, Berkeley, together with the South Australian Museum (sce Chap. 2 by R. H. Tedford, this volume, and in Rich & van Tets 1985), was further explored by a number of American and Australian
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 37
groups, and is still a research focus. The mid to late Cainozoic fossiliferous Riverslcigh area of northwestern Queensland is one of the rare jewels that was discovered during the initial exploration of the 20th century, but its real potential and significance lay unrecognized until Michael Archer (University of New South Wales) initiated a detailed survey of the area in the 1980's. And finally, the Quaternary cave deposits along the southern and eastern parts of Australia, investigated by a number of Australian and American workers from many institutions (Australian National University (Canberra), Flinders University (Adelaide), Western Australian Museum, University of Texas, Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, amongst others) have produced very large collections of vertebrate material, some quite young, but including many extinct forms.
The discovery by R. A, Stirton (Fig. 19) during the mid-20th century of Tertiary vertebrates in the Lake Eyre Basin is particularly momentous. It not only found a number of previously unknown mammals and birds, some quite unusual and quite distinct from any of the living groups in the Australian extant or Quaternary fauna, but it quite clearly led to a real acceleration of activity in Australian vertebrate palacontology. Ruben Arthur Stirton had come to Terra Australis, an explorer in 1952, to find pre-Pleistocene mammals in quantity. He did what he came to do (Stirton ef al. 1961, Stirton et al. 1968). From those expeditions that he led, fanned on by his infectious enthusiasm, came students, funding and a momentum that continues to the present.
By the 1970's and early 1980's Australian vertebrate palacontology had finally come of age. Certainly by this time, Basalla's stage 3 had been reached. Australian vertebrate palaeontologists were quite visible and looked for the most part to their overseas colleagues as equals and co-workers. Indigenous expeditions as well as a number of joint expeditions involving such groups as the South Australian Museum (Adelaide), the University of California (Berkeley and Riverside), the Bureau of Mineral Resources (Canberra, especially with regard to work in the Northern Territory and Papua New Guinea (see Plane, this volume, Chap. 3), the American Museum of Natural History (New York), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D. C.), the Queensland Museum (Brisbane), the Museum of Victoria (Melbourne), the British Museum (London), the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago), the University of Texas (Austin), the University of New South Wales (Sydney), Monash University (Melbourne), and the Australian Army. This approach differs vastly from the colonial days where material was often collected by local collectors and then shipped overseas for study by people such as Owen. By this time field work and theoretical work alike was being carried out by both locals and foreign experts, and neither group tried to shove the unruly Australian record into a European or North American mould.
Today with a number of full time and part time positions filled by vertebrate palaeontologists in Australia, research and training of personnel locally is ensured. Although becoming increasingly restricted, funding for field work, research and publication in this area is available locally from both governmental and private sources. Because of this together with the lively interest of scientists, and some funding agencies (such as the National Geographic Society and Earthwatch) and private enterprise, from around the world, in the development of Australia's unique biota, a lively period of discovery is insured for what remains of the 20th century. Much of this work will undoubtedly be directed by Australians, but it will be significantly enriched by interactions on an international level, interactions which should be encouraged and nurtured. The scientific findings will, in turn, be of no small interest to the general public (Fig. 24).
38 - RICH & ARCHBOLD
Figure 24. An official crest, of Mr. Rhys Walkley, which incorporates one of Australia's extinct fossil ventebrates, Diprotodon, here shown with a trunk, (Courtesy of R. Walkley).
HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 39
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people are to be thanked for their assistance in preparation of this paper; D.F. Branagan and W.D.L. Ride for their reviews; T.H. Rich, M.V. Macdonald, J.R. Macdonald, J. Monaghan, and C. Williams for their editorial remarks; E. B. Joyce for the lend of his copy of T.L. Mitchell (1838); several individuals noted in the figure captions for providing illustrative material; D. Gelt, S. Morton and F. Coffa for illustrative work and material; A. Player for information on J.E.T. Woods; and Australian Geographic, Dick Smith, S. Hand and J. Lavarack for providing Fig. 23.
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Ngapakaldia from Miocene terrestrial sediments of northern South Australia. These sheep-sized diprotodontids inhabited the Centre when it was much better watered. (From Rich & van Tets 1985, with permission of The Museum of Victoria).
CHAPTER 2
VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY IN AUSTRALIA: THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION
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1 Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York 10024, U.S.A.
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INTRODUCTION
It may seem presumptous in the context of the history of vertebrate palaeontology in Australia to focus on an American contribution if it were not for its conspicuous presence in the years after the Second World War. American financed and directed work in the early post- war years demonstrated the necessity of direct exploration for Australia's fossil vertebrates. This was not a foreign invasion directed from the outside with all the spoils going overseas, but a cooperative venture between palaeontologists of the United States and Australia. The most important fruits (type specimens) of this international effort remained in or were returned to Australia to stimulate research in the country of origin. This cooperative approach to the development of the fossil record is largely responsible for the post-war burgeoning of the field in Australia, as has already been documented in historical reviews by Rich (in Rich & Thompson 1982 and Rich & van Tets 1985), Archer & Hand (in Archer & Clayton 1984) and in this volume.
To place the American contribution in context, I briefly examine the state of vertebrate palaeontology in Australia before and just after World War II, and then detail the post-war American presence during four decades, each of which is characterized by different levels of involvement.
BETWEEN THE WARS
Australian vertebrate palaeontology was about as isolated from foreign involvement as its unique vertebrate fauna during the years between WWI and WWII. The field, however, held a number of prominent and active enthusiasts who continued to describe the fauna while carrying out official duties in other areas. Three were museum directors, C.A. Anderson (Australian Museum), L, Glauert (Western Australian Museum) and H. Longman (Queensland Museum), and two were academics, E.S. Hills (Univ. Melbourne) and the Rev. R.T. Wade from Sydney. Between these men there were studies of Devonian and Mesozoic fishes, Cretaceous dinosaurs and marine reptiles, Cainozoic fishes, reptiles and mammals. Discoveries in the science depended mostly on contacts with interested laymen and their initiative to send material to the museum. Such field work as was carried out was often done within the investigators’ private means. Nevertheless, important discoveries were made and promptly reported in the scientific literature. Prominent among these were Hills’ studies on the largely unknown Devonian fishes; Longman's description of the first important remains of Cretaceous dinosaurs, and Anderson's work on the first Tertiary (Pliocene) marsupials from New Guinea.
Toward the end of this period Edmund Gill, palacontologist of the National Museum of Victoria (now Museum of Victoria), began a geochemical investigation of the provenance of a number of vertebrate fossils in that collection. Comparing the flourine content of museum specimens with material obtained in situ of the purported sites, Gill (1957) was able to demonstrate the Tertiary age of other remains from Victoria and Tasmania (including verification of the provenance of the marsupial Wynyardia). This work came to fruition at the time of the first American effort to find Tertiary mammals, and Stirton and Gill's collaboration (1957) gave the first hint of the nature of the Neogene fossil record of marsupials.
THE 50'S, THE FULBRIGHT YEARS
There were a number of factors that brought the first American contingent of vertebrate palaeontologists to Australia. Perhaps the most important was the "world-view" of the United States in the heady days of outreaching international influence that gripped the nation at war's
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 47
end. This was manifested by such programs as the Marshall Plan, and most significantly for academics, by the Fulbright scholarship program that eventually sent hundreds of American graduate students and professors overseas.
The lack of documentation from the fossil record of the history of vertebrates in Australia has long been noted by biologists. This large and intriguing biological problem focused attention on the continent as a science frontier. In the years after World War II state and federal geological surveys were increasingly active in mapping the areal geology of Australia, so that the distribution and character of the outcropping rocks was becoming sufficiently well known for exploratory work. This made it possible to actually find rocks of specific types and ages and to plan field work to explore for a fossil record rather than wait for reported discoveries. This combination of international science, an important biological problem, data to initiate a
ie and time and adequate funds to pursue it, all came together in the first decade after the end of the war.
Figure 1. Four vertebrate palacontologists who worked in northem South Australia in 1950's: left to right, Alden Miller, Richard Tedford, Paul Lawson and R.A. Stirton. (Courtesy of Paul Lawson).
Ruben Arther Stirton (Fig. 1), Professor of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, and his graduate student Richard H. Tedford, both obtained Fulbright Scholarships in
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1953 and spent nine months in Australia searching for a Tertiary mammal record. They had important allies in the Geology Department of the University of Adelaide, in the South Australian Museum and the Mines Department of South Australia, all of whom generously contributed important knowledge and support, including the help of G. Davidson Woodard, then a University of Adelaide graduate student, and Paul F. Lawson of the Museum, Agreements were forged with the South Australian Museum over the disposition of collections and many other matters that have served as a basis for continued cooperation with that institution extending to the present day. Lawson, in particular, continued to serve the joint project for many active years and into retirement.
, a
Figure 2. The initial excavation of the Woodard Quarry, Lake Palankarinna, South Australia, July 1953. The holotype lower jaw of the diprotodont Meniscolophus mawsoni Stirton, 1955 is in the centre foregound between the brushes.
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY ~- 49
Figure 3. Looking southeast across the bluffs at the Tedford Locality on the western shore of Lake Palankarinna, South Australia. White deposits are dolomitic mudstone within the Etadunna Formation (Middle Miocene) overlain by darker sandstones of the Tirari Formation (Plio-Pleistocene),
The historical development of this work has been detailed elsewhere by Tedford (in Rich & van Tets 1985). In brief, the Fulbright program made possible an extended reconnaissance necessary to give the explorers time to become acquainted with the special conditions of the Australian nonmarine Cainozoic. The serendipitous discovery of Lake Palankarinna (Figs 2-3), east of Lake Eyre, in northern South Australia saved the 1953 effort from near failure and served as a focal point for a number of successful field excursions in later years. During the 50's Fulbright and University of California intramural funds along with funds from the collaborating Australian institutions enabled Stirton to send three additional expeditions (1954, 1957, 1958) to the Lake Eyre Basin. Personnel! on these expeditions varied, but Lawson (Fig.
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4) served as liaison officer in all of them. Stirton was joined by his student Leslie F. Marcus in 1954, and Marcus remained in Australia into early 1955 to work on the Bingara Pleistocene fauna at the Australian Museum. William Ricdel (1954) and Brian Daily (1957) (Fig. 5) in their capacity as Curator of Fossils at the South Australian Museum were also contributors. Daily, in particular, set the framework for the Neogene stratigraphy of the Lake Eyre Basin.
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Figure 4. Paul F. Lawson at Lake Pitikanta in 1958 excavating a small marsupial skeleton from the Etadunna Formation .
Tedford was the only American member in the 1957 field party from the South Australian Museum that reaffirmed the presence of an important late Cainozoic record east of Lake Eyre. This work recovered four superposed fossil vertebrate faunas of Miocene through Pleistocene age in central Australia (Figs 6-15). All the taxa in the older assemblages were new to science, considerably expanded the diversity of some families of living marsupials and established the presence of extinct groups vindicating a long held belief that Australia's fauna had a lengthy and complex history.
Ernest L. Lundelius Jr. (University of Texas) and William A. Turnbull (Field Museum of Natural History) had also been intrigued as graduate students at the University of Chicago with the lack of a record of mammals in Australia before the Quaternary. Lundelius was encouraged to apply for a Fulbright by visiting lecturer in Zoology, A. R. Main, of the University of
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 51
Figure 5. Brian Daily plotting the expeditions course, lower Strzelecki Creek, South Australia, 1957.
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Figure 6. Lower jaws and bones of the wallaby Prionotemnus palankarinnicus Stirton, 1955 in situ in the Mampuwordu Sand, Lawson Quarry, Lake Palankarinna, South Australia, 1961.
Western Australia, and he went to that institution for his scholarship year in 1954-1955. Lundelius was also intrigued by the research of Claude Hibbard of the University of Michigan on the response of American mammal faunas to environmental change during the Quaternary. When he saw the rich, undescribed Quaternary collections in the Western Australian Museum and the potential of field work in this area, he recognized that material was at hand for similar studies in Australia, Thus, his objective shifted to Quaternary and Holocene faunal sequences, resulting in his first contribution in this field in 1960. This has remained a major focus of his Australian research to this date.
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 53
THE 60'S, THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION GRANTEES
In the 1960's support for work in Australia became increasingly costly, and the American investigators sought funds from the National Science Foundation. Stirton's work eventually involved earth moving equipment as well as the expensive field vehicles.
Field parties remained small, principally involving himself, Tedford and Lawson. Alden H. Miller, University of California palaeornithologist, joined in 1961 and Stirton's graduate student Michael 0. Woodburne in 1962 (Figs 16-21).
Figure 7. Looking south along the bluffs on the north-westem side of Lake Palankarinna, South Australia. Vehicle on the right is below the Lawson Quarry; the Woodard Quarry is on the flats at the foot of the bluffs just to the right of the farthest bluff, 1962.
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Figure 8, Looking west across Lake Kanunka, South Australia. Bluffs expose fossiliferous Tirari and Etadunna formations; Stirton Quarry lies behind the hill at the right hand end of the outcrop, 1957.
A new Miocene faunal level was discovered in the Lake Eyre sequence in 1962 and an exploratory trip to the upper Sandover River north of Alice Springs in Northern Territory was made by Stirton, Tedford and Woodburne to investigate a Late Miocene fossil site discovered by the Bureau of Mineral Resources geologists. This site, on Alcoota Station, was so promising that Woodburne returned in 1963 with U. C, graduate student John Mawby and BMR personnel, to open a large excavation (Woodburne 1967) (Fig. 22). At the same time Tedford with Alan Lloyd of the Bureau of Mineral Resources undertook a reconnaisance of Tertiary deposits in southern Northern Territory and western Queensland finding a few Miocene vertebrates at Kangaroo Well, south of Alice Springs (Deep Well Station), and reaffirmed the
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 55
Figure 9. Green Bluff, Warburton River, South Australia, looking downstream. The white limestone band is in the Etadunna Formation claystones and is overlain by fossiliferous Pleistocene deposits, 1957.
occurrence of Miocene vertebrates from the Carl Creek Limestone on Riversleigh Station of western Queensland ( Tedford 1967, Lloyd 1967).
In 1962 Stirton visited the Wau mining district in Papua-New Guinea to examine newly collected Pliocene mammal remains from the gold-bearing Otibanda Formation (see Plane, this volume, Chap. 3). These were the same rocks that yielded the first Tertiary mammals collected from New Guinea described by Anderson in 1937, Geoffrey Woodard had been sent to Wau in 1955 by Stirton, but most of the small collection obtained was lost in shipping. The new effort was spurred by the discoveries of Mike Plane of the Bureau of Mineral Resources working out of Wau. Plane (1967a-b) subsequently studied all the material in Berkeley, where he described it as the Awe Fauna.
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Figure 10. R.A. Stirton ("Stirt") in 1958 at Stirton Quarry, Lake Kanunka, South Australia. The holotype jaw of the extinct kangaroo Troposodon kentii Campbell, 1973 is in situ in the Tirari Formation at his nght
hand.
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 57
This decade saw two reviews of the developing Tertiary faunal sequence for Australia. In 1961, Stirton, Tedford & Miller presented the biostratigraphic framework for the Lake Eyre Basin. The four faunas were augmented with a fifth Miocene assemblage in 1967 by Stirton, Tedford and Woodburne. A further review combining all Australian (including the newly discovered Miocene Bullock Creek Fauna, Plane & Gatehouse 1968) and New Guinea data into a synthesis of a continent-wide faunal succession was published in 1968 by Stirton, Tedford & Woodburne, two years after Stirton's fatal heart attack.
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Figure 11. Moming tea at Lake Ngapakaldi, South Australia in early August 1961 during early work at Ngapakaldi Quarry. From left, R.A. Stirton, H.J. Bowshall, Alden and Virginia Miller.
Ermest Lundelius Jr. (now at University of Texas) returned to Australia in 1963-4 with William Turnbull of the Field Museum, Chicago. Their NSF supported field work involved both a search for Tertiary mammals in Victoria and Tasmania and continued work on Quaternary and Holocene sites in Western Australia, particularly the caves of the Nullarbor Plain. This work resulted in their obtaining a definitive Pliocene fauna, the first to be radiometrically dated, from the site at Hamilton in western Victoria discovered by Gill in the early 50's (Turnbull and Lundelius 1970). They also exploited the fossiliferous deposits in Madura Cave on the Nullarbor Plain of Western Australia working out a !4C-dated Holocene and Late Pleistocene succession (not yet completely reported in a series of papers of Lundelius
58 - TEDFORD
& Turnbull 1973, 1975, 1978, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1989). These sites were further exploited by Lundelius and Turnbull during seven weeks in 1966-7 with funding from the University of Texas and the Field Museum.
Figure 12. Removing overburden at the Stirton Quarry, Lake Kanunka, South Australia in 1961. Alden Miller is at the scoop, while Tedford and Lawson mind the winch. (Courtesy of R. A. Stirton).
In 1960 Charles Camp of the University of California followed up a lead to Triassic vertebrates in the Blina Shale of the Fitzroy Basin, northwestern Western Australia. Bureau of Mineral Resources geologists had made the discovery in the early 50's, and the material had been seen by Stirton in Canberra in 1953. Camp's work was conducted with the Western Australian Museum, and his graduate student John Cosgriff was included in the field party. This work, which recovered the first diverse Early Triassic vertebrate fauna from Australia, was followed by further investigations by the Western Australian Museum in 1963 and 1964 (E. H. Colbert of the American Museum of Natural History participated in 1964). In 1965 Jim Warren and John Cosgriff revisited the sites for Monash University. Cosgriff (1965, 1969, and with Garbutt, 1972) described the labyrinthodont amphibians from the Blina Shale, but the other elements of this vertebraie fauna remain to be described.
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 59
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Figure 13. Two partial skeletons (both headless) of the small diprotodont Ngapakaldia tedfordi Stirton, 1967 in Ngapakaldi Quarry, Lake Ngapakaldi, South Australia, 1962. Skeleton in upper right of view lies on its back, front feet to the right; skeleton at lower left lies on its right side, facing left.
In 1964 John Cosgriff was appointed a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Geology of the University of Tasmania, where he remained until 1967. During this period he continued his studies of Triassic labyrinthodonts, culminating in his review of the Tasmanian forms published in 1974 after his return to Wayne State University.
In 1961 the first American vertebrate palaeontologist appointed to an academic post in Australia arrived at the newly formed Monash University. Dr, James Warren soon became Professor of the Department of Zoology of that institution, and he initiated the first graduate studies in vertebrate palacontology in eastern Australia. W. D. L. Ride, Director of the Western Australian Museum held a joint appointment with the University of Western Australia in 1957-1974, which included graduate studies in vertebrate palaeontology. _—_ His first Ph.D.
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Figure 14. Lawson Quarry, Lake Palankarinna, South Australia, near the end of excavations in 1961. Kangaroo long-bones on either side of geology hammer are in the base of the Mampuwordu Sand. Top of the Mampuwordu Sand is about level with the bottle tops, vertical at the face is the Tirari Formation.
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 61
student in that field was the Fulbright scholar Michael Archer, who came from Princeton University in 1967.
vee’ a ieee <0, ys eee ee we, Gap a esc poet “ o an met pay NTE oe gle ~ Petes eile ORE. ws rs ha ate fie : wens Te, be 2 <, 3 4 moo a = i niet Nahe ge = 2 * hm oe ee Se sist : 3 » 3 oe - o 7 ina ve, ao ‘ 5 * ST 4 nin - TF he . , Seat . ae - e : sine” sgt dt ; @ e A ‘ en a. “i OO 1S es ie Te a: F gt cal gar Ls Papago, . oa * Se ee ‘ . “ee
Figure 15. Backhoe in operation at Lawson Quarry, Lake Palankarinna, South Australia in 1962. Lawson operates the hoe, M.O. Woodbume collects material left exposed the previous year.
Toward the end of the decade the Geology Section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science held the first symposium on vertebrate palaeontology at their annual meeting in Melbourne in 1967. The meeting was dominated by Americans (Stirton, Tedford, Woodburne, Lundelius, Turnbull, Cosgriff, and Warren) but included reports by Michael Waldman, Warren's first Ph.D. student, and Michael Plane of the BMR, newly returned from thesis work under Stirton at Berkeley.
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Figure 16. R. A. Stirton (left) and R.H. Tedford at Leaf Locality excavation, Lake Ngapakaldi, South Australia in 1962. Fossil leaf-bearing shales have been stripped off the top of the ancient stream channel by the backhoe, and the collectors are working on the sands, conglomerates and clays that fill the deeper channel where fossil vertebrates occur. (Courtesy of M. O. Woodbume),
THE 70'S CAREERS FOR AMERICAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGISTS IN AUSTRALIA
The early part of the decade proved to be a favourable time for American vertebrate palacontologists particularly interested in research in their field in Australia to actually find
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 63
Figure 17. M. O. Woodbume picking out small bones and teeth from Leaf Locality pebbly sands that have been washed through screen wire in ground-water pools dug at Lake Ngapakaldi, South Australia.
academic or museum positions there. The discoverics of the 1950's and 1960's had demonstrated that an expanding range of evidence was available, including chapters in the history of vertebrates heretofore unwritten. At the same time the field was also attracting Australian students, so that by 1971 when the Geology Section of ANZAAS held its second symposium on vertebrate palacontology there were only three speakers from the United States (Cosgriff, Romer and Tedford) and twelve Australians reporting diverse researches from Devonian fishes to Pleistocene marsupials. Most of the Australian speakers held academic or museum positions. There were few students sufficiently advanced to step into the jobs that were being offered by administrators aware of the intellectual promise of this developing field. An exception was Michael Archer, who returned to his native land (he was born in Sydney) as
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Figures 18-21. Field notes and drawings Australia. (Courtesy of the Museum of Paleontology, University of
Locality, Lake Ngapakaldi, northem South California, Berkeley).
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 65
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AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 67
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Figure 22. M.O. Woodbume excavating at Paine Quarry, Alcoota Station, Northem Territory, in the initial work in 1962. Bones can be seen drying after shellacing in the left foreground and in the excavation to the
tight of the whiskbroom.
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 69
a Fulbright scholar in 1967, obtained his degree at the University of Western Australia in 1972 and was appointed Curator of Mammals of the Queensland Museum the same year. He remained in Queensland until 1978, when he accepted an appointment in the School of Zoology of the University of New South Wales where he remains to this date. Archer's move to an academic position at the University of New South Wales, and his exploitation of new and very rich Miocene sites at Riversleigh in northwestern Queensland has resulted in a flood of interest in vertebrate palaeontology and in turn attracted a number of graduate students, At present count (Archer, pers. comm. 1988) fourteen students are enrolled in higher degree programs under Archer's guidance. In addition to this academic interest, Archer's program has promoted the involvement of interested nonprofessionals, many of whom are making important contributions to the field and laboratory work at Riversleigh.
During the early 1970's another American student to study vertebrate palaeontology in Australia was Larry Marshall, who completed an M.Sc. at Monash in 1974 under Jim Warren. Marshall's work (1973) was concerned with the Plio-Pleistocene mammal faunas from sites on the Murray River region in the tri-state area that would have been inundated by construction of the Chowilla Dam. His work revealed an important faunal succession recently calibrated palaeomagnetically. Marshall returned to the United States in 1974 to continue studies of New World marsupials at the University of California. His subsequent research has continued to emphasize this field.
Thomas Rich and his wife, Patricia Rich, were introduced to Australia as members of Tedford's 1971 field party that worked Miocene sites in the Lake Frome area. The couple immigrated to Australia in 1973, first with Fulbright support for Pat, and later both took up positions at the Museum of Victoria (Tom) and the Earth Sciences and Zoology Departments of Monash University (Pat) where they remain to date. T hey have spent much time in wideranging reconnaissance for fossil vertebrate sites throughout Australia - most recently, and successfully, in the Early Cretaceous deposits of coastal Victoria where a remarkable high- latitude fauna of dinosaurs and other vertebrates is turning up in the joint work of the Museum of Victoria and Monash University (Rich et al. 1988, Rich & Rich 1989). Pat Rich's Ph.D. thesis (Columbia University) reviewed all available fossil bird remains from Australia, emphasizing the dromornithid birds, especially the newly available Tertiary forms. She continues her paleornithological studies at Monash, and she and Tom have guided M.Sc. & Ph.D, students in that field, including both Australians (e.g. Tim Flannery, John Long, Charles Meredith), as well as Americans (e.g. Robert Baird), amongst others.
In the late 70's two other American academics came to Australia. Ralph Molnar initially took a post in the Department of Anatomy, University of New South Wales but in 1979 became Curator of Mammals and Fossil Vertebrates at the Queensland Museum. His reviews of Australian lower tetrapods and studies of Crocodilia, theropods and Australia's first pterosaurs are important contributions to the Mesozoic fauna. Peter Murray, University of Chicago physical anthropologist, joined the Tasmanian Museum staff, and very quickly became involved in determining the late Quaternary mammal succession in the island State. Important new data were acquired during exploration of caves in northern and eastern Tasmania with collegues at the University of Tasmania. Murray described the vertebrate remains and reviewed the record of the giant echidna Zaglossus in Australia. In 1981 he moved to the Northern Territory Museum, first to Darwin and later to Alice Springs, to the post of Curator of Fossil Vertebrates and has pursued studies on Tertiary mammals there.
The 70's saw a renewal of field work in Australia by Stirton's students Woodburne and Tedford, who joined with other American and Australian colleagues to continue exploitation of the Lake Eyre Basin sites and to explore for new sites in Queensland and South Australia. The National Science Foundation provided most of the support for these expeditions, but important contributions were made by the cooperating institutions, namely the South Australian and Queensland museums.
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Figure 23. Excavations at Lake Callabonna, South Australia in 1983 by the Museum of Victoria, Monash University and a contingent of the Australian Army led by John Wild and Tom Rich. A, excavation of one of five Diprotodon skeletons found during the 10 day expedition; B, preserving the bones before plaster- jacketing them for removal; C-D, plaster jacketing the bones for protection during their transport back to Melboume; E, removal of the plaster-jacketed specimen to a waiting Army vehicle; F, John Wild, commander of the Australian Army unit in charge of the Callabonna expedition, holding a Scotch Whiskey jug left by the Stirling and Zietz expeditions in the late 19th century, Discovery of this relic allowed location of the campsite that Stirling and Zietz and Hurst had used during their early excavations (see Rich & Archbold, Chap. 1, this volume). (Courtesy of the Australian Army).
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 71
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AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 73
In 1970, Tedford and Columbia University graduate student Bob Emry, joined with the Smithsonian's Clayton Ray and Frank Pearce and South Australian Museum's Neville Pledge and Paul Lawson to reinvestigate the famous Pleistocene sites at Lake Callabonna (Fig. 23) in South Australia. This was the first large-scaled work there since the original expedition sponsored by the South Australian Museum in 1893 and Stirton's visit in the 50's. The fauna was enlarged by finding taxa other than Diprotodon. Diprotodon trackways (Tedford 1973) were discovered, and the local geology was outlined for the first time and fit into the Cainozoic sequence developed for the nearby Lake Frome area. Near the close of this field work the South Australian Museum hosted a field conference led by Tedford at Lake Callabonna and in the eastern Lake Eyre Basin. This trip lasted 7 days and included David Ride and Harry Butler (Western Australian Museum); Alan Bartholomai (Queensland Museum); Jim Warren (Monash University), Grant Inglis, Neville Pledge and Paul Lawson (South Australian Museum); Mike Plane (Bureau of Mineral Resources); and Mines Department South Australia and Bureau of Mineral Rresources geologists,
Roger Callen, indefatigable geologist of the Mines Department, South Australia, discovered Tertiary bone fragments southeast of Lake Frome in 1970, and these became the harbinger of the Miocene fauna discovered by Tedford's party in 1971 (Figs 24, 25, 26). That year the field party included Tom and Pat Rich then graduate students at Columbia and Rod Wells, a graduate student at the University of Adelaide. This party made the first collection of vertebrates from that area, including many taxa new to the Australian Miocene. Moving into Queensland, Alan Bartholomai of the Queensland Museum joined the party. The group went on to explore (without success) deposits east of the Dividing Range in Queensland, then moved to the Winton area in central Queensland where a few fragmentary dinosaur bones and a spectacular trackway site (Lark Quarry) were located in the Winton Formation with the assistance of a local grazier, Peter Knowles. No fossil vertebrate remains were found in the overlying Tertiary deposits.At the close of this trip, after Bartholomai returned to Brisbane, the party returned to South Australia and briefly joined Woodburne's group working at Lake Palankarinna east of Lake Eyre.
In 1971 Woodburne had combined with William A. Clemens of the University of California to set up the first large-scale screen washing of fossiliferous matrix from Miocene rocks in the Tirari Desert east of Lake Eyre. They were joined by Colin Campbell, Australian graduate student at California, Mike Archer, just finishing at the University of Western Australia, and Neville Pledge (Fig. 26). The washing technique proved to be highly successful with many new taxa coming to light. This was an inspiration for Tedford's work in 1973 when the washing technique was applied to the Namba Formation east of Lake Frome. Tedford's 1973 party included Alan Bartholomai, Mike Archer (newly appointed at the Queensland Museum), Rod Wells (then at Monash University), Neville Pledge and Mike Plane and Dick Brown of the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Canberra. Most of the field season was spent exploiting the Miocene Namba Formation southeast of Lake Frome where a large and very successful washing program was set up. A few weeks were also devoted to completing the reconnaissance of the Palaeogene Eyre Formation outcrops in northeastern South Australia and adjacent western Queensland. This work failed to find any animal remains in these well- exposed deposits.
Woodburne spent his sabbatical year in Australia in 1972 during which he again joined with Australian colleagues Mike Plane, Mike Archer, Paul Lawson and Winston Head of the South Australian Museum in the field at Lake Palankarinna (Fig. 27) with further success in washing the Etadunna Formation there.
In 1976 Lundelius and Turnbull (Figs 28, 29) returned to Western Australia to continue work on Quaternary faunas and to explore the Pilbara district for Tertiary mammal occurrences. They all visited Hamilton in Victoria. Funding for this work again came from the Fulbright Program (for Lundelius) along with University of Texas, National Geographic Society and
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Figure 26 A, expeditions into the Lake Eyre Basin in the early 1970's. Above is the field party to Lake Palankarinna, South Australia in 1971. Left to right: Colin Campbell, Mike Woodbume, Tom Rich (a inember of Tedford’s party), Rod Wells (a member of Tedford's party), Mike Archer, Dick Tedford, and Bill Clemens. Picture is taken at Stirton’s old camp site. B, R.H. Tedford's field party that discovered the new fossil field in the Lake Frome area in 1971: from the left, Tom Rich, Dick Tedford, and Rod Wells
(Courtesy of P. V. Rich).
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 75
Field Museum contributions. No Tertiary vertebrates were found in the Oakover beds, but studies of Quatemary mammals were advanced.
Figure 27. A, R. A. Stirton (right) and Paul Lawson on early reconnnissance trip in the Lake Eyre Basin during the 1950's. B, Excavation in the Lake Frome area or South Australia (Lake Tarkarooloo) in 1976 by a party from the Museum of Victoria; sediments are of Miocene age and related to those at Lake Palankarinna; P. Morrison (foreground) and M. Vickers. C, Stirton's favourite camping spot at Lake Palankarinna, behind the Cannuwalkaninna sanddune. Several expeditions mounted by the BMR, the Museum of Victoria and Monash University, the Queensland and South Australian Museums and the University of New South Wales retumed to exploit Stirton's old sites and locate new ones in the 1970's and first half of the 1980's. (B and C courtesy of P. V. Rich).
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This decade saw an enormous increase in field work undertaken by Australian workers using private, university, and federal funds (Australian Research Grants Scheme, Australian Research Council) and funds from cooperative projects with other institutions. Notable were Archer's privately supported (Dr. R. E. Lemley (Fig. 30), Rapid City, South Dakota) work in Queensland which included exploiting the discovery of a Pliocene site near Charters Towers (Bluff Downs), and his realization of the enormous potential of the Riversleigh Miocene site in the northwest of the state. Joint projects between Queensland and Victoria museums to the Frome and Lake Eyre Miocene sites in South Australia and the Miocene at Alcoota (Fig. 22) in the Northern Territory provided comparative material and new taxa from the sites discovered by the American parties,
Palaeozoic fishes were collected from eastern Australia by the Australian Museum (Alex Ritchie, who was also carrying on field work in Antarctica), Monash University (Jim Warren and John Long), Australian National University (Ken Campbell), Bureau of Mineral Resources (Gavin Young) and Queensland Museum (Susan Turner and Anne Kemp). The spectacular Devonian Gogo site in the Kimberley district of Western Australia was discovered and worked initially in the 60's by joint British Museum (Natural History) and Western Australian Museum teams and later by parties from the Australian National University, the Bureau of Mineral Resources and the Western Australian Museum.
An important new site for Triassic tetrapods was found in southern Queensland and worked by Anne Warren and Latrobe University parties and Tony Thulborn of the University of Queensland. Cretaceous vertebrates were collected from the Eromanga Basin in Queensland by joint British Museum (Natural History) and Queensland Museum group. Systematic prospecting of the Early Cretaceous in Queensland, New South Wales and especially Victoria by Ralph Molnar (University of New South Wales, Queensland Museum) and Pat and Tom Rich (Monash University, Museum of Victoria) has improved the record of vertebrates from these rocks.
Quaternary vertebrate records were also improved, spectacularly, with the discovery of rich deposits in part of the Victoria Cave in the Naracoorte district of South Australia by Rod Wells (Flinders University) and the South Australian Caving Group. Neville Pledge added a new Miocene level to the sequence at Lake Palankarinna during a joint field trip of Australian vertebrate palaeontologists and Ernest Lundelius following the International Geological Congress in Sydney in August of 1976 (Fig. 30).
THE 80'S, AUSTRALIAN VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY COMES OF AGE
At the beginning of the present decade vertebrate palaeontology was being addressed in most universities and state museums throughout Australia, and in some federal departments as well. The Queensland Museum has Alan Bartholomai, Director, Ralph Molnar and Mary Wade, curators, and Susan Turner and Anne Kemp Research Fellows and Tony Thulborn in the University of Queensland. In New South Wales, Mike Archer is at the University of New South Wales, his former graduate students Tim Flannery is at the Australian Museum (Mammalogy) and Suzanne Hand is a Research Fellow at the University. Alex Ritchie is Curator of Fossils at the Australian Museum, These individuals also offer or cooperate in graduate programs in the Sydney area universities. Jeannette Hope (Fig. 28), palacomammalogist, employed by the New South Wales Parks Department, is also based in Sydney. Canberra has palaeoichthyologist Ken Campbell at ANU, Mike Plane (now retired) and Gavin Young at the BMR, and vertebrate palaeontologists David Horton and John Gorter are associated with the Institute of Aboriginal Studies. In the Melbourne area Tom Rich is Curator of Fossils at the Museum of Victoria, Pat Rich (Earth Sciences and Botany/Zoology)
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 77
(Botany/Zoology) are at Monash University and Anne Warren is at Latrobe University. Former Curator of Fossils at the Museum of Victoria, is fossil wombat specialist Eric Wilkinson, geologist for the Department of Mines, Victoria in Ballarat. In Tasmania, Museum Director Don Gregg and Curator of Fossils Noel Kemp are vertebrate palaeontologists, and palaeoichthyologist John Long is Research Fellow in Geology at the University of Tasmania.
Figure 28. Vertebrate palaeontologists who attended the International Geological Congress held in Sydney in 1976. This group attended a field conference that visited sites in westem New South Wales, including the Wellington Caves: left to right, Dr. Lehman, M. Vickers, E. Ritchie, T. Rich, ?, B. Ritchie, P. Rich, A, Ritchie, S. Ritchie, L. Dawson, M. Archer, J. Hope, ?, E. Lundelius, J. Lundelius, N. Pledge. (Courtesy of P.
V. Rich).
Honours and graduate studies in vertebrate palaeontology are conducted in South Australia by Rod Wells at Flinders University. Neville Pledge is Curator of Fossils at the South Australian Museum. Both coordinate a number of amateurs in the state and work with local caving groups to the great benefit of the science. The Northern Territory Museum has employed Peter Murray as Curator of Vertebrates, the first vertebrate palacontologist in that important region. Only Western Australia at present lacks a permanent academic or museum position in vertebrate palacontology. Alex Baynes, Research Associate at the Western Australian Museum, is the only vertebrate paleontologist in the state, but Ken McNamara, Curator of Fossils of the Western Australian Museum has more than a passing interest in the
subject.
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Figure 29. Localities producing vertebrate fossils in Australia worked during the 1970's and 1980's. A-C, Hamilton, a Pliocene site dated radiometrically by the basalt that overlies the fossiliferous sediments. C, Tom Rich in the foreground and Tim Flannery. The Museum of Victoria and Monash University carried out major excavations and sieving operations on this site that had originally been discovered by Edmund Gill and later worked by Emest Lundelius and William Tumbull. D-F, Lord Howe Island, South Pacific, Pleistocene: D, partial specimen of a procellarid bird still in the matrix; E, Alex Ritchie (foreground) and Steve Barghom excavating Meiolania , the Lord Howe Island Horned Turtle; F, Gene Gaffney puttin plaster jacket on a Horned Turtle specimen. (Courtesy of P. V. Rich).
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 79
This roster lists only those actively engaged in the field as professionals. There are many more students and a growing number of amateurs attracted to the science. As mentioned, Wells and Pledge work closely with vigorous amateurs and Archer has incorporated a corps of amateur enthusiasts into a "Riversleigh Society” to help transform the mountain of limestone from these deposits into research specimens. The field by its very nature continues to capture public attention, and this has been important in developing private as well as public funding necessary for sustenance of field and laboratory work and the growing cost of publication of scientific papers.
Figure 30. A, Australian Army support on expedition into the Lake Eyre Subbasin with T. H, Rich in the mid-1970's; B, Ray Lemley, who provided finances for several of M. Archer's expeditions into central and northem Australia; C, Michael Archer; D, mid-Tertiary northern Australian limestone country at Bullock Creek, Northern Territory, a site of similar nature to the rich Riversleigh deposits of northwestern Queensland. (Courtesy of P. V. Rich).
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American contributions to field studies have continued into the 80's. Both Tedford and Woodburne pursued field projects begun in the 50's in attempts to tie-up loose ends of the Lake Eyre Basin faunal sequence. Woodburne spent 14 months in Australia in 1984-5 during which he conducted two field seasons of work at Miocene sites in the eastern Lake Eyre Basin with his students Judd Case and Mark Springer. Bruce MacFadden of the University of Florida, working with the Woodburne party, initiated magnetostratigraphic studies on the Etadunna Formation. This detailed biostratigraphic work has resolved the "Ngapakaldi Fauna” of Surton, Tedford and Miller (1961) into a six-fold faunal succession that spans sufficient time so that evolutionary change is visible in most lineages that extend through the succession. Bruce MacFadden's student, Mick Whitelaw, an honours graduate of Monash University, is continuing to apply magnetostratigraphic techniques to the Plio-Pleistocene successions.
In 1980 and 1983 Tedford joined with Rod Wells, Paul Lawson and Well's student Dominic Williams plus a number of other willing workers from the Flinders University staff and Students to work in the Lake Eyre Basin. Steven Barghoorn of New York a member of the party in 1983 conducted a magnetostratigraphic study of the Tirari Formation. This work was jointly funded by ARGS and the National Geographic and was designed to clarify the Pliocene and Pleistocene stratigraphy and vertebrate palacontology of the deposits east of Lake Eyre. The results were reported at the de Vis Symposium and will be published in those proceedings, but a preliminary statement has been published (Tedford, Williams & Wells 1986), The "Katipiri Sands" of Stirton, Tedford & Miller (1961) was resolved into two formational units representing penultimate and ultimate glacial ages, and new local faunas were discovered in the Late Pliocene Tirari Formation and the overlying Pleistocene units.
In 1980 Eugene Gaffney (Fig. 29) of the American Museum of Natural History revitalized the search for the homed tortoise (Meiolania) on Lord Howe Island while holding a Visiting Curatorship at the Australian Museum. He was assisted by then Columbia University graduate students Steve Barghoorn and Paul Sereno in cooperation with Alex Ritchie and Bob Jones of the Australian Museum. This work met with gratifying success, and Gaffney returned to Lord Howe Island in 1982 supported by funds from the American Museum and NSF. Barghoorn and Columbia graduate student Ann Burke completed the party, A further trip in 1987 supported by the American Museum employed local help on Lord Howe Island, This work enabled Gaffney to completely describe the osteology and relationships of the Lord Howe Island species of Meiolania, the most completely known representative of the genus. In the course of these studies Gaffney also reviewed the fossil record of Australian turtles and made a number of contributions to the morphology of Australian taxa present in museum collections there and in the United States,
High levels of activity sustained by this growing population of vertebrate palaeontologists has increased the rate of discovery of important links in the chain of vertebrate history in Australia over the past decade. Highlights of this activity would certainly include the description of well preserved moulds of the Ordovician vertebrates, Australia's oldest (Ritchie & Gilbert Tomlinson 1977); the continuing yield of new and spectacularly preserved Devonian fishes from Gogo, Western Australia (Long 1987); the Triassic fauna at Rewan, Queensland including the first Australian therapsid (Thulborn 1983); the increasingly diverse and peculiar Early Cretaceous dinosaurs (Rich et al. 1988, Rich & Rich 1989); the oldest Australian mammal, a platypus (Archer et al. 1985); one of the oldest Australian birds (Molnar 1986) the diverse array of vertebrates from the Miocene of Riversleigh (Archer et al. 1989), a rich undescribed Late Miocene or earliest Pliocene fauna from a fissure fill in South Australia (Pledge pers. comm.) and the spectacular Victoria Cave deposit, South Australia now shown to be of penultimate glacial age (Wells et al. 1984). Much of this research was summarized and new work reported at the de Vis Symposium held in at the Queensland Museum, Brisbane, in 1987. Thirty-five Australian and six foreign contributors discussed aspects of the entire vertebrate record. Notable at this third major meeting of vertebrate palaeontologists (after a gap
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 81
of 17 years) was the number of students reporting thesis research and the professional reports of two amateurs. Clearly the field has reached maturity in Australia.
CONCLUSIONS
The historical review presented above indicates that the American contribution to vertebrate palaeontology in Australia has been most direct in initiating and sustaining for over thirty years a level of field work that has directly revealed aspects of the history of the fossil vertebrates of that continent. The American effort has consistently been directed toward exploration for new sites and their exploitation. From the beginning this work has been conducted with Australian colleagues, few at first, but later with growing numbers of persons as the field generated interest among Australians. By the 1970's most of the field work was being conducted from within Australia funded by local institutions, the National Geographic Society and the ARGS. Some investigators also found significant private sources or obtained the assistance of the Australian armed forces for larger-scale logistical support. Much of this work exploited localities previously discovered in order to increase knowledge and to gain Australian reference materials from the more important sites. At this point the American effort focused more on completion of long-term studies in areas initially discovered or worked by them, and such work continues at diminishing scale to the present day.
Certainly the greatest contribution to come from the American presence is the excitement the field has generated in the minds of Australians as is so amply testified by the number of Australians fully involved professionally in this field and the growing number of students entering it. This situation took only a couple of decades to develop into the mature state the field now enjoys in Australia.
Much has been done, but much more remains to fully realize Australia's potential in documenting its vertebrate history. Although there are several Devonian fish sites scattered across the continent, the other Palaeozoic periods are poorly represented or unrepresented. Nevertheless, the Palaeozoic is present in thick geoclinal rock sequences of untapped potential in contrast to the cratonic Mesozoic and Cainozoic where shallow basins and long exposure to weathering and erosion limit the possibility for a record considerably. Despite this, the Triassic and Early Cretaceous have yielded much, although the Jurassic is an almost complete blank. The thicker rift-filling Cretaceous of Victoria has special significance because of its polar position, and indeed most of Australia was at high latitude during the Mesozoic. The Palaeogene is nearly a total blank except for a few turtles and penguins; the Tertiary record is limited at present to the latest Palaeogene (except perhaps for one early Tertiary site recently discovered in Queensland) and Neogene when carbonate sedimentary environments favorable to the preservation of bone appear in the continental record. Filling this "ghastly blank" in vertebrate history will require a new approach to prospecting, perhaps focusing on Palaeogene continental carbonates either fissure fills or clastic carbonate fluviatile or lacustrine deposits (the Miocene Carl Creek Limestone is a model). Large blanks still remain in the Neogene and Quaternary but favourable geological situations are still awaiting exploration. Continued work at the levels applied in the present decade promise a revolution in our knowledge of the vertebrate history of Australia by the next century.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
These historical notes were put together from personal records and the literature. Through the years many people have helped to flesh-out this recent phase of the history of vertebrate palaeontology in Australia. I have called on Ernest Lundelius Jr., Mike Woodbume and Ralph
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Molnar to help check aspects of the story, and to them and all my colleagues in the ever exciting task of determining Australia's vertebrate history, I express my deepest gratitude.
REFERENCES
ANDERSON, C., 1937. Palaeontological notes. No. IV. Fossil mammals from New Guinea. Rec. Aust. Mus. 20(2): 73-76.
ARCHER, M. & CLAYTON, G., 1984. Vertebrate Zoogeography & Evolution in Australasia. Hesperian Press, Carlislet.
ARCHER, M, FLANNERY, T.F., RITCHIE, A. & MOLNAR, R.E., 1985. First Mesozoic mammal from
Australia - an early Cretaceous monotreme. Nature 318: 363-366.
ARCHER, M., GODTHELP, H, HAND, S. & MEGIRIAN, D., 1989 Fossil mammals of Riversleigh, northwestern Queensland: preliminary overview of biostratigraphy, correlation and environmental change. Aust. Zool .25(2): 29-65.
COSGRIFF, J.W., 1965. A new genus of Temnospondylii from the Triassic of Wester Australia.J. Proc. R. Soc. West. Aust. 48: 65-90.
COSGRIFF, J.W., 1969. Blinasaurus, a brachyopid genus from Westem Australia and New SouthWales. J. Proc. R. Soc. West. Aust. 52: 65-88.
COSGRIFF, J.W. & GARBUTT, N.K., 1972. Erythrobatrachus noonkanbahensis, a trematosaurid species
from the Blina Shale. J. Proc. R. Soc. West. Aust. 55: 5-18. GILL, E.D., 1957. The stratigraphical occurrence and palaeoecology of some Australian Tertiary marsupials. Mem. natn. Mus. Vict. 21: 135-203.
LLOYD, A., 1967. An outline of the Tertiary geology of northem Australia. Bur. Min. Res. Bull. 80.
LONG, J.A., 1987. Late Devonian fishes from the Gogo Formation, Westem Australia - new discoveries. Search 18: 203-205.
LUNDELIUS, E.L., IR. & TURNBULL, W.D., 1973. The mammalian fauna of Madura Cave, Western Australia. Fieldiana Geol. 31: 1-35.
LUNDELIUS, E.L., JR. & TURNBULL, W.D., 1975. The mammalian fauna of Madura Cave, Western Australia, Part I. Fieldiana Geol, 31: 37-117.
LUNDELIUS, E.L., JR. & TURNBULL, W.D., 1978. The mammalian fauna of Madura Cave, Western Australia, Part III. Fieldiana Geol. 38: 1-120.
LUNDELIUS, E.L., JR. & TURNBULL, W.D., 1981. The mammalian fauna of Madura Cave, Western Australia, Patt IV. Fieldiana Geol. n.s. 6: 1-72.
LUNDELIUS, E.L., IR. & TURNBULL, W.D., 1982. The mammalian fauna of Madura Cave, Western Australia, Part V. Diprotodonta (Part). Fieldiana Geol. n.s. 11; 1-32.
LUNDELIUS, E.L., JR. & TURNBULL, W.D., 1984. The mammalian fauna of Madura Cave, Western
Australia, Part VI: Macropodidae: Potoroinae. Fieldiana Geol. n.s. 14: 1-63.
LUNDELIUS, E.L., JR. & TURNBULL, W.D., 1989. The mammalian fauna of Madura Cave, Western Australia, Part VII: Macropodidae: Sthenurinae, Macropodinae, with a review of the marsupial portion of the fauna. Fieldiana Geol. n.s. 17: 1-71.
MARSHALL, L., 1973. Fossil vertebrate faunas from the Lake Victoria region, southwest New South Wales, Australia. Mem. natn. Mus. Vict. 34: 151-171.
MOLNAR, R., 1986. An enantiomithine bird from the Lower Cretaceous of Queensland, Australia. Nature 322(6081) : 736-738.
PLANE, M. D., 1967a. Stratigraphy and vertebrate fauna of the Otibanda Formation, New Guinea. Bur. Min. Res. Bull. 86: 1-64.
PLANE, M.D., 1967b. Two new diprotodontids from the Pliocene Otibanda Formation, New Guinea. Bur. Min. Res. Bull. 85: 105-128.
PLANE, M.D. & GATEHOUSE, C., 1968. A new vertebrate fauna from the Tertiary of northern Australia. Aust. J. Sct.30(7): 272-273.
RICH, P.V., RICH, T.H., WAGSTAFF, B.E., MCEWEN MASON, J., DOUTHITT, C.G., GREGORY, R.T. & FELTON, E.A., 1988. Evidence for low temperatures and biologic diversity in Cretaceous high latitudes of Australia. Science 242: 1403-1406.
RICH, T.H. & RICH, P.V., 1989. Polar dinosaurs and biotas of the Early Cretaceous of southeastem Australia, Nat. Geog. Res. 5(1): 15-53.
RICH, P.V. & THOMPSON, E.M., 1982. The Fossil Vertebrate Record of Australasia. Monash University Offset Printing Unit, Clayton.
RICH, P.V. & VAN TETS, G.F., 1985. Kadimakara: Extinct Vertebrates of Australia. Pioneer Design Studio, Lilydale.
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION TO VERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY - 83
RITCHIE, A. & GILBERT-TOMLINSON, J., 1977. First Ordovician vertebrates from the southern hemisphere. Alcheringa 1: 351-368.
STIRTON, R.A., 1957. Tertiary marsupials from Victoria, Australia. Mem. natn. Mus.Vict. 21: 121-134.
STIRTON, R.A., TEDFORD, R.H. & MILLER, A.H., 1961. Cenozoic stratigraphy and vertebrate paleontology of the Tirari Desert, South Australia. Rec. S. Aust. Mus. 14(1):19-61.
STIRTON, R.A., TEDFORD, R.H. & WOODBURNE, M.O., 1967. A new Tertiary formation and fauna from the Tirari Desert, South Australia. Rec. S. Aust. Mus. 15(3): 427-462.
STIRTON, R.A., TEDFORD, R.H. & WOODBURNE, M.O., 1968. Australian Tertiary deposits containing terrestrial mammals. Univ. Calif. Publs. geol. Sci. 77: 1-30.
TEDFORD, R.H., 1967. Fossil mammals from the Carl Creek Limestone, northwestem Queensland. Bur. Min. Res. Bull. 92: 217-237.
TEDFORD, R.H., 1973. The diprotodons of Lake Callabonna. Aust. Nat. Hist. 17: 349-354.
TEDFORD, R.H., WILLIAMS, D. & WELLS, R.T., 1986. Lake Eyre and Birdsville Basins: Late Cainozoic sediments and fossil vertebrates. In The Lake Eyre Basin Cainozoic Sediments, Fossil Vertebrates and Plants, Landforms, Silcretes and Climatic Implications, R. T. Wells & R. A. Callen, eds., Australasian Sedimentological Group Field Guide Ser. 4,Geological Society of Australia, Sydney: 42-72.
THULBORN, R.A., 1983. A mammal-like reptile from Australia. Nature 303: 330-331.
TURNBULL, W.D. & LUNDELIUS, E.L., 1970. The Hamilton fauna: a late Pliocene mammalian fauna from Grange Bum, Victoria, Australia. Fieldiana Geol. 19: 1-163.
WELLS, R.T., MORIARTY, K. & WILLIAMS, D.L.G., 1984. The fossil vertebrate deposits of Victoria Fossil Cave, Naracoorte: An introduction to the geology and fauna. Aust. Zool. 21(4): 305-333.
WOODBURNE, M.O., 1967. The Alcoota fauna, central Australia: An integrated paleontological and geological study. Bur. Min. Res. Bull. 87: 1-187.
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Large leaf-eating stenurine kangaroos. In the background Sthenurus tindalei, in the foreground the largest, and as yet undescribed, species from the Pleistocene deposits at Lake Callabonna in South Australia.
CHAPTER 3
MUSINGS ON NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES
Michael D. Plane! Introduction .............cccccceeccecceeceseceucesccenceescens 86 The First Fossil Vertebrate Remains.................. 86 The European Discoveries.......c..cceccescceeeceesees 86 The Stirton Years........ccecscssssssssseseseressseees 87 Bureau of Mineral Resources Involvement.......... 90 Further Excavations in the 1960's ..................00. 90 Stirton's First Visit to New Guinea
and a Second Period of BMR
INVOIVEMENL...........ccecccesccessccceceuscceeececeece 91 Further Work in the Late 1960's to Present......... 95 WieS ta UTIANe 8 es ie Mate he ee eo a 97 Conclusions? c05: 1b .5h coset Rvcvedt coteeM ce 97 References... sis. cBikoteccss odeegts uedstvadselelealecd 97 PIAS codes ache cd edbtie cede: hele dutht te Ics be ds 98
1 "Allsun” via Gundaroo, New South Wales 2620, Australia.
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INTRODUCTION
The discovery of fossil vertebrates in Papua New Guinea has progressed in a rather haphazard, but not unexpected fashion. This discussion is a highly personal and anecdotal account of that progression over the last fifty years. It is far from complete, as I am not au fait with all of the work done by the myriads of archaeologists who have excavated human habitation sites, and who have discovered fossil vertebrate remains in their digs (e.g. Bulmer & Bulmer 1964, White et al. 1970, White 1972).
THE FIRST FOSSIL VERTEBRATE REMAINS
Natural scientists have long realized that the living faunas of Australia and New Guinea have strong similarities and mutual genera on both sides of Torres Strait. It was correctly assumed in the 1930's, when Europeans were just starting to explore the hinterland of this great island that in due course some of Australia's extinct forms would also be found in New Guinea. With the commencement of alluvial mining in areas of Tertiary and Pleistocene sedimentary rocks that is just what happened.
We shall never really know who first saw fossil vertebrate remains, but given the indigenous populations’ cultural preoccupation with natural objects, it would be surprising indeed if someone had not discovered fossil bones well before Europeans came to New Guinea. Unfortunately, there is no recorded history, so we shall have to start with what has been written down.
THE EUROPEAN DISCOVERIES
The first fossil bones came to the attention of the scientific world through the offices of two stalwarts of New Guinea geology, G. A. V. Stanley and N. H. Fisher, neither of whom was a palaeontologist. In the mid-1930's, Stanley, then working as a geologist for Oil Search Ltd., visited Fisher, the Government Geologist for the Territory of New Guinea, at his Wau office, where he was shown two "mandibular rami" that had been brought in from the gold workings in the Watut Valley. Fisher forwarded these fossils, together with additional material, which he obtained after visiting the Watut workings, to the Australian Museum in Sydney. On a subsequent visit to the Museum, whilst on leave, Fisher provided Charles Anderson, the Director, with observations on the geology and a geological sketch map. Anderson, who was a mineralogist and crystallographer, had a keen interest in palaeontology and, fortunately, realised the importance of these fossils. He published an account of the geology, based on Fisher's observations and map, and described Nototherium watutense, the first fossil mammal published about from Papua New Guinea (Anderson 1937).
The alluvial gold workings in the Watut and Bulolo valleys (Fig. 1) continued to produce fossils, both before and after World War II. Some of the material went to the Australian Museum, one specimen ended up at the British Museum of Natural History in London, and much was kept as local curiosities. Immediately pre-war, L. C. Noakes, Assistant Government Geologist, wrote accounts of the geology of the Upper Watut and Bitoi/Black Cat areas. Both covered areas within which fossil vertebrates had been found, but unfortunately both remained unpublished (Noakes 1938a, 1938b). Towards the end of the war, Fisher's outline of the geology of the Morobe Gold Field appeared (Fisher 1944).
NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES - 87
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@ Awe faunal site
Figure 1. Vertebrate fossil bearing sites in New Guinea, excluding archaeological materials. THE STIRTON YEARS
In 1953, R. A. Stirton, an American from the Berkeley campus of the University of California, came to Australia on a Fulbright Fellowship (see also Tedford, this volume, Chap. 2). Stirton was preceded by a reputation for being a tenacious and persistant seeker of fossils in inhospitable and out of the way places. Amongst the many things that Stirton accomplished during his first year in Australia, was a thorough survey of the Tertiary fossil material in Australian museums. He was intrigued by the material from New Guinea and made a note to look into it further when time and opportunity allowed. His notes of 14 October 1953 (Fig. 2) state:
"I squeezed in time to sketch Figs. 115-116, the macropodid from New Guinea which looks more like the Palankarinna form than any-thing I have seen yet. This New Guinea material (Figs. 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116) is of unusual interest. It has the feel of early Pliocene or late Miocene. Later I hope to spot these localities on a map - much of it comes from the Watut area. Dr. Norman Fisher asked me about N. watutense when I was in Canberra. He probably can give us more dope on the geology of the area (also see C. Anderson, 1937). I hope it can be arranged to get some field work done in that area."
88 - PLANE
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(Courtesy of the Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley).
fossils of New Guinea.
NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES - 89
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90 - PLANE
By 1955 Stirton had, indeed, organised funds which allowed G. D. Woodard, an Australian from Adelaide, who was Stirt's student at the University of California, to go to New Guinea and search the Bulolo-Watut area for fossil mammals. Woodard made his base at Bulolo, the mining headquarters of the Bulolo Gold Dredging Co. He was befriended and assisted by Keith Collins-Rubie, a mining foreman who had an intimate knowledge of the geology at the "Sunshine" and "Widubash" operations, and who displayed a keen interest and understanding of the fossils. A sizeable collection was made, and the bulk of the material was crated and transported by road to the port of Lae for shipping to San Francisco. It was never seen again. Fortunately, Woodard had decided to carry the best specimens back to the United States by hand, These were incorporated into the Museum of Paleontology collections and eventually worked on in 1964-1965.
BUREAU OF MINERAL RESOURCES INVOLVEMENT
It seems clear that neither Collins-Rubie nor Woodard made contact with the geologist, on secondment from the Australian Bureau of Mineral Resources to the Territory of New Guinea Administration, who had his office just 17 kilometers by all weather road to the south at Wau. Had they done so, much of mutual benefit might have resulted.
J.G. Best was the Resident Geologist at that time, and he, guided by Horrace Clissold of New Guinea Goldfields Ltd., the leasee of the Korange Open Cut Mine near Wau, had photographed and partly removed the skull of a juvenile diprotodontid, from the Otibanda Formation exposed in Koranga Creek. I say "partly removed," because from a photograph, one can discern that the specimen was at one time in excellent condition. Very little of it was eventually to find its way into the Commonwealth Palaeontological Collection, much being lost during excavation.
Some further spasmodic collecting was carried out in the Watut area during the years of 1956 to 1962, but none of the specimens reached scientific institutions.
FURTHER EXCAVATIONS IN THE 1960'S
During 1960 in the highlands, near Chuave, archaeologist Susan Bulmer excavated the left half of a mandible of Thylacinus. This exciting find demonstrated once again the close ties between Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea and the tremendous geographic range of Thylacinus (Van Deusen 1963).
By 1962, Stirton's curiosity, egged on by one or two tantalising Woodard specimens of the genus Protemnodon, which he had under study at the time, roused him to organise, in conjunction with Alden Miller, an ornithologist and palaeornithologist, and Bill Lidicker, a mammalogist, both from the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley, an expedition to New Guinea, By this time Stirton had been in touch with the Bureau of Mineral Resources (BMR) in Canberra. Keith Rochow, a BMR geologist working with Alan Newsome, mammalogist from the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization), had visited and realised the worth and potential of the fossil deposits at Alcoota, northeast of Alice Springs. Here N. H. (Doc) Fisher again enters the story, He was by now Chief Geologist with the BMR (later to become its Director). He was impressed, and who could fail to be, with Stirton's enthusiasm for fossil mammals and their utility in the correlation of non-marine rocks. The BMR at that time had responsibility for Northern Territory geology, and Fisher agreed to co-sponsor some work at Alcoota. Stirton, of course, knew of Fisher's early association with the New Guinea fossils and mentioned his impending
NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES - 91
visit to the Watut-Bulolo area. Fisher then wrote to the Resident Geologist at Wau giving instructions that every possible assistance was to be given to Stirton and his party.
STIRTON'S FIRST VISIT TO NEW GUINEA AND A SECOND PERIOD OF BMR INVOLVEMENT
I was the recipient of that letter, and frankly, I was nonplussed. I had no formal training in palaeontology, it being taught at the University of Cape Town when I was an undergraduate as a throw away subject. Fourteen lectures out of Wood's Palaeontology, a book so dry that it was in danger of spontaneously combusting and one which reduced a potentially fascinating subject to abject boredom, was my sum total of experience with the subject. The charming lady who taught the subject was a brilliant petrologist, but her interest in fossils must have rated no higher than a one on a scale of ten. What on earth was I supposed to do with this unexpected visitor? Well, it didn't take me long to realise that here was someone who exuded enthusiasm and had a real love for his subject. I couldn't resist and very soon became involved in all aspects of the work.
Stirton, again helped by Keith Collins-Rubie, concentrated on the sites at "Sunshine", where Woodard had had success in finding fossils. He, too, unearthed bones, but the sites proved to be rather thinly populated. Three incidents stay in my mind from that time, and they demonstrate the cameraderie, zest and sense of fun which so many vertebrate palaeontologists bring to their work.
In order to get to the fossil site at "Sunshine", one had to ford a river, which ran rather swiftly at about waist high on a person of average height. The bed of the river was rather coarse boulders. To see Stirton, who was himself rather short, negotiating the muddy waters, stripped and with his clothes, collecting gear and hat perched on his head gave us many a laugh. The bobbing cork managed it, day in, day out, and our predictions about him losing the lot were certainly unfounded.
My field assistant, Timbu Tasong and Stirton achieved instant rapport, Tasong clearly feeling a sense of responsibility towards this visitor to his country, tried to mother him while holding him in great awe for his prowess with the shotgun. On the day that Stirton put up two quail and calmly shot both, one with each barrel, Tasong's admiration turned to adulation.
On another occasion, Stirton had us all in stitches when he shot a duck, which fell inconveniently into the middle of a 400 metre wide tailings dam. Not a breath of wind to carry it to shore, no dog to retrieve it - off came the clothes and in went our naked professor to retrieve the prize in his mouth in a manner never bettered by any gundog!
"Sunshine" having proved a little disappointing, we turned our attention to the Watut area, where we found some fossils and located tuff beds that subsequently proved suitable for potassium/argon dating.
All too soon, however, Stirton, Miller and Lidicker had to return to the United States. We parted having agreed that we would continue joint work on the fossils, stratigraphy and sedimentology. Timbu Tasong went to work prospecting, particularly in the Watut. He found many sites (Fig. 3, Pls 1, 2), and we developed a number of them into productive quarries. The fossil material was sent to the University of California Museum of Paleontology (U.C.M.P.), where I eventually ended up during 1964-1965, ostensibly to work on the stratigraphy of the Otibanda Formation, and to learn something about vertebrate palaeontology. Stirton, in his kind and disarming fashion, handed over all the fossil material from New Guinea, so I had, in the nicest way, been thrown in at the deep end.
92 - PLANE
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(After Plane 1967a).
NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES - 93
Figure 4. A, Wallabia rufogrisea, right pex x1/3, Recent; B, Protemnodon otibandus, right pes with left calcaneum drawn in reverse and restored parts indicated with broken lines, x1/2; C, left calcaneum, ventral view, x1/2; D, left calcaneum, dorsal view. x1/2; E, metatarsal IV, side view, x1/2; F, metatarsal IV, dorsal view, x1/2. (From Plane 1967a).
94 - PLANE
Figure 5. Fossils from the Otibanda Formation, Pliocene. A-C, right P? of Protemnodon otibandus; a, occlusal view; B, posterior view; C, lingual view; tooth length 17.8mm; D-E, Crocodilus cf. porosus, viewed from two sides. F, right proximal tarsometatarsus, anterior vies of Casuarius sp; maximum length 64.5mm. (From Hoch & Holm 1986). G-I, Thylacinus sp., left P2; G, lingual view; H, labial view; I, posterior view. (From Plane 1976).
NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES - 95
FURTHER WORK IN THE LATE 1960'S TO PRESENT
At the University of California I spent much of my time studying and writing up the recently found New Guinea material. This proved to be a most productive time for me, with two publications resulting in short order (Plane 1967a, 1967b) (Fig. 4). I returned to New Guinea in 1967 to wet screen some of the Watut sites for small vertebrates. The locality I worked was ideal for this type of operation, with good, flowing water, plenty of willing helpers and good sunshine for drying. The results, however, were quite disappointing, but I was at least able to confirm the presence of rodents during the Pliocene, albeit indeterminate
with regard to species.
Some field work has been carried out in the Watut area after my work there - by Pat Wooley, a mammalogist from La Trobe University and Ella Hoch, a Danish palaeontologist from Copenhagen (Hoch & Holm 1986) (Fig. 5, Pl. 3).
“OS NEW IRELAND
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Figure 6. Geology and location of the Pureni site, which has produced a Pleistocene fauna. (From Rich ef
al. 1988).
Figure 7. Hulitherium tomasettiit, a panda-like diprotodontid from Pureni (artist P. Schouten, in Flannery & Plane 1986).
Besides the fossils found in the Wau Valley, additional material, incduding unidentifiable rodent remains, were recovered at Pureni (Fig. 6) in the Eastern Highlands. A Late Pleistocene
NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES - 97
site was discovered there during improvements to the mission airstrip during 1967. The local tribesmen, digging with handtools, discovered a layer rich in bones and plant material. Although nominally Christians, the people were both excited and frightened, bones being associated with ancestors. The result of this was that some of these tabu objects were broken by the nervous poking and proding. Luckily, the late Father Bernard Tomasettii realised the scientific worth of the material and salvaged it.
In 1969, I visited the site together with Paul Williams, a post-doctoral fellow from the Australian National University. We investigated the stratigraphy, made further fossil collections and put down an auger hole at the vertebrate site (Williams ef al. 1972). A fascinating diprotodontid, Hulitherium tomasettii, named for its discoverers and salvager, was described in 1986 (Flannery & Plane 1986)(Fig. 7, Pls 6-10), as later was a pygmy cassowary, Casuarius lydekkeri (Rich, Plane & Schroeder 1988) (Pls 4, 5). Tim Flannery, a mammalogist at the Australian Museum, in addition to co-studying Hulitherium has made further investigations in the area and has published on new macropodid species from other Late Pleistocene sites in New Guinea (Flannery ef al. 1983).
Rod Wells of Flinders University carried out field work in New Guinea, in 1975. I had been asked if I would be interested in going to excavate some fossil bones discovered by English speleologists deep in caves in the Western Highlands karst country. Being a total coward and not at all fond of deep, dank, humid holes in the ground, I immediately offered the opportunity to Wells, who revels in those conditions. He went, collected the fossils of a sirenian but to this day claims that I tried to get him killed. On leaving the cave, he was almost overtaken and drowned by rapidly rising flood waters caused by a thunderstorm at the surface.
WEST IRIAN
No mention has been made of the western half of island New Guinea, and to date only limited vertebrates have been described from there (Zygomaturus; Hardjasamita 1985). They do exist, and material from cave deposits has been found. There are tantalising hints at a rich new Pleistocene fauna, which includes small diprotodontids, possibly related to Hulitherium.
CONCLUSIONS
Given the difficult nature of field work in New Guinea, the unravelling of its prehistoric faunal history is likely to be slow and erratic. That its vertebrate fauna during the late Tertiary and Pleistocene is closely related to forms in Australia is undoubted. The specialisations displayed by the diprotodontids, however, such as Kolopsoides from the Watut and Hulitherium from Pureni, demonstrate that new and exciting discoveries lie in wait for those who continue the search for the ancestors of New Guinea's fauna.
REFERENCES
ANDERSON, C., 1937. Palacontological notes. No. IV: Fossil marsupials from New Guinea. Rec. Aust, Mus. 20(2): 73-76.
BULMER, S. & BULMER, R., 1964. The prehistory of the Australian New Guinea Highlands. Am. Anthrop. 66(4): 39-76.
FISHER, N.H., 1944. Outline of the geology of the Morobe Goldfield. Proc.R. Soc. Qd. 55(4): 51-58.
FLANNERY, T.F., MOUNTAIN, M.J. & APLIN, K., 1983. Quatemary kangaroos (Macropodidae, Marsupialia) from Nombe rock shelter, Papua New Guinea, with comments on the nature of megafaunal extinction in the New Guinea highlands. Proc. Linn. Soc. NS.W. 107(2): 75-98.
FLANNERY, T.F. & PLANE, M., 1986. A new late Pleistocene diprotodontid (Marsupialia) from Pureni, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. Bur. Min. Res. J. Aust. Geol. Geophys. 10: 65-76.
98 - PLANE
HARDJASAMITA, H.S., 1985. Fosil diprotodontidi Zygomaturus Owen 1859 Dari Nimboran, Irian Jaya. Psekmnan Ilmiah Arkeologi 3, Jakartai, PPAN: 999-1004.
HOCH, E. & HOLM, P.M., 1986. New K/Ar age determinations of the Awe Fauna gangue, Papua New Guinea: Consequences for Papuaustralian late Cenozoic biostratigraphy. Modern Geol. 10: 181-195.
ies it L.C., 1938A. Preliminary geological report on the Upper Watut area. New Guinea Admin. Rep. unpubl.).
Ee L.C., 1938B. Geological report on the Upper Bitoi-Black Cat area. New Guinea Admin. Rep. unpubl.).
PLANE, M.D., 1967a. Stratigraphy and vertebrate fauna of the Otibanda Formation, New Guinea. Bur. Min. Res. Bull. 86: 1-64.
PLANE, M.D., 1967b. Two new diprotodontids from the Pliocene Otibanda Formation, New Guinea. Bur. Min. Res. Bull. 85: 105-128.
PLANE, M., 1976. The occurrence of Thylacinus in Tertiary rocks from Papua New Guinea. Bur. Min. Res. J. Geol. Geophys. 1(1): 78-79.
RICH, P.V., PLANE, M. & SCHROEDER, N., 1988. A pygmy cassowary (Casuarius lydekkeri) from late Pleistocene bog deposits at Pureni, Papua New Guinea. Bur. Min. Res. Aust. Geol. Geophys. 10: 377-389.
VAN DEUSEN, H.M., 1963. First New Guinea record of Thylacinus. J. Mammal. 44: 279-280.
WHITE, J.P., 1972. Ol tumbuna: archaeological excavations in the Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea. Terra Australis, Aust. Nat. Univ., Canberra.
WHITE, J.P., CROOK, K.A.W. & RUXTON, B.P., 1970. Kosipe: a late Pleistocene site in the Papua Highlands. Proc. Prehist. Soc. 36: 152-170.
WILLIAMS, P.W., MCDOUGALL, I. & POWELL, J.M., 1972. Aspects of the Quatemary geology of the Tari- Koroba area, Papua. J. geol. Soc.Aust. 18: 333-347.
PLATES
Plate 1. A, Stream channel in the Otibanda Fm, Koranga Creek, near Bulolo, Papua New Guinea; B, Awe Fauna type locality on top of cliff near the umbrella. Looking south, Ekuti Range in back-ground, beneath clouds (from Plane 1967a).
Plate 2. Typical exposures in upper Watut Valley, looking west. High ridge in background is Ekuti Range (from Plane 1967a).
Plate 3. Right mandible of Protemnodon buloloensis, The sectorial P3 more elongate than any molar, and all teeth wear simultaneously. Otibanda Fm, Upper Watut area (photo by B. Bang from Hoch & Holm 1986).
Plate 4. Casuarius lydekkeri. Femora: right, CPC26605b, A, internal view, D, proximal view; left, CPC26605c, B, internal view, C, proximal view. Tibiotarsi: right, AMF50094, E, posterior view, G, distal view, L, anterior view, M, internal view; right, CPC26605d, F, posterior view; H, distal view, J, anterior view, N, intemal view; left, CPC2660Se, K, internal view, L, proximal view. Scale bar, 1 cm. All specimens from Pureni, except AMF50094, whose locality is unknown.
Plate 5. Casuarius lydekkeri. Tibiotarsi, right, AMF50094, A, external view; right, CPC26605d, B, extemal view. Tarsometatarsi, right, CPC26605f, C, anterior view, E, proximal view; left, CPC26605g, D, proximal view; left, CPC26605h, F, anterior view, G, distal view. Phalanges: Casuarius phalanx 2 digit II: C. benneitti, left, H, proximal view, L, distal view, O, lateral view, C. casuarius, right, I, proximal view, M, distal view, P, internal view; C. sp. from Awe, P.N.G., UCMP70129, left, J, proximal view, N, distal view, Q, lateral view; UCMP 70129, right, K, proximal view, R, intemal view. Scale bar, 1 cm. All C. lydekkeri specimens except AMF50094 are from Pureni.
Plate 6. A, lateral view, and B1, B2, stereo occlusal view of partial cranium of holotype of Hulitherium tomasettii from Pureni (after Flannery & Plane 1986).
Plate 7. Stereo dorsal view of cranium of Hulitherium tomasettii (from Flannery & Plane 1986).
NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES - 99
Plate 8. Holotype of Hulitherium tomasetti (from Flannery & Plane 1986). A, C, stereo occlusal view of partial left M3.5, xl; B, D, stereo occlusal view of right M3 and Ms, xl; E, G, stereo occlusal view of posterointernal comer of right P3, x2; F, H, stereo occlusal view of partial right M34, xl; I, K, stereo anterior view of anterior face of protolophid left M2, x2; J, L, stereo view of central portion of buccal face of right P3, x2 (after Flannery & Plane 1986).
Plate 9. A, B, stereo view of posterior face and D, E, anterior face of proximal left femur fragment; C, anterior face, and F, posterior face of right tibia of Hulitherium tomasettii (after Flannery & Plane 1986).
Plate 10. A, B, stereo view of anterior face, and C, D, posterior face of right proximal humerus fragment,
E, posterior face, and F, anterior face of distal right humerus fragment of Hulitherium tomasettii (from Flannery & Plane 1986).
100 - PLANE PLATE 1
PLATE 2 NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES - 101
102 - PLANE PLATE 3
PLATE 4 NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES - 103
104 - PLANE RLATES
PLATE 6 NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES - 105
106 - PLANE PLATE 7
PLATE 8 NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES - 107
108 - PLANE PLATE 9
PLATE 10
NEW GUINEA FOSSIL VERTEBRATE DISCOVERIES
- 109
ee
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110 - PLANE
rb “ i ce * Kull BAGH. oe e ee eat 82 ee ek ok ta ie. # a
Many species of flamingoes or related birds are known from the now arid Centre of Australia. This reconstruction is of central Australia 15 million yBP. In the foreground Phoeniconotius eyrensis cares for a juvenile. the more gracile Phoenicopterus novaehollandiae feeds in the mid distances, while the white-coloured palaelodids stand in the mid-background, (From Rich & van Tets 1985, with permission of The Museum of Victoria).
CHAPTER 4
PALAEOCLIMATIC SETTING AND PALAEOGEOGRAPHIC LINKS OF AUSTRALIA IN THE PHANEROZOIC
Lawrence A. Frakes! and Patricia Vickers-Rich2
TA OGUCH ONE sis dee eis ont ce hen b dee oh ag on debBiBsleles oa trees 112 A Brief History of Global Climates.................. 113 Phanerozoic Climates of Australia................04. 116 Cambrian Period .............cccsceecscceeeeneeeeeeees 116 Ordovician Period...........cccccccceeececeneeeeeeeees 117 Silurian Period ...........cccceceeecececececeeeeeeeeees 118 Devonian Period ...........cececcessceceeeeeeeeeseeens 119 Carboniferous Period ..............cccececeeeeeeeeees 120 Permian Period ............ccccececeeeceeeeeeeeeeeees 122 Triassic Period..........ccccccssesececessceceeeeerenees 123 Jurassic Period.........cccccsessseccscceceseceeeeeeees 124 Cretaceous Period.........cccecccsssceceseeceeeeeeees 125 CAIN OZ OICHERA sce ton obs. 0rvee cutee cetess se vea' tecths 127 Geographic Links and Barriers: Determinants of Biotic Distributions...............ccceceeeeeeeees 130 CONCLUSIONS. ..0..t.csscie itis ces nddevebiedeertiessesecedadane 137 REPETCTICES Foe. wce:siere streets lo XG- oho Sars ajinn oh faglobeaneibon selves soe 143
a
1 Department of Geology & Geophysics, University of Adelaide, South Australia 5001, Australia. 2 Earth Sciences and Botany/Zoology Departments, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia.
112 - FRAKES & RICH
INTRODUCTION
A look at the distribution of climates on the modern globe reveals that elements such as mean annual temperature, rainfall, etc. are controlled largely by latitude. That is, similar climates tend to occur in latitudinal ("zonal") bands, unless strongly influenced by topographic irregularities. This banding arises from the equator-to-pole gradient in heat energy received from the sun, but the effect is imperfect because of geographic controls on transport of heat toward the poles in both atmosphere and oceans (e.g. the Gulf Strearn). Seasonal variations in distribution of sunlight owing to the tilt of the earth cause climate bands to shift their latitudinal positions over the year.
The relative elevation of continents, and their locations, also have strong influence on regional climate. Climates in the Alps are markedly colder and wetter than lowland climates at the same latitude, and on a global scale, the east coasts of continents in mid-latitude are characterized by more humid climates than are west coasts. Additionally, the location of a continent is important because land masses serve as barriers to circulation in the air and in the oceans and thus affect their own climates. Also, since land reflects more sunlight than does water at the surface of the earth, concentration of land at low latitudes means that less heat will be retained in the system, and overall, climaies of the earth will be cooler. Thus, in considering palaeoclimates it is vital to know not only the latitudes of a continent but its elevation (especially mountains), its relationship to oceanic circulation patterns and the global distribution of land and sea. Climatic changes through the Phanerozoic, as well as the changing geography, have affected the options available to the biota for dispersal and distribution.
There is abundant evidence, in the form of widespread tillites, evaporites, reef limestones, etc. as well as in palaeotemperatures inferred from measurement of oxygen isotopes, that the thermal state of the climate system has varied greatly over earth history (Frakes 1979). The climate of a continental land mass, therefore, varies not only as a function of its position and elevation but also as a consequence of the global thermal state. For example, parts of Australia were glaciated during the late Palaeozoic, but the continent remained nearly, if not entirely free of permanent ice during the Mesozoic, although the continent lay at approximately the same latitudes during both intervals. The first half of the Permian was a time of great cooling over most of the earth, whereas the Mesozoic featured exceptionally warm climates, except in polar areas.
Several factors combine to make interpretation of palaeoclimatology difficult. First, the climate system is complicated by a network of positive and negative feedback mechanisms, which hinder determination of cause and effect relationships. Second, geologic materials, or proxy evidence as they are referred to by Lamb (1977), must be correctly and precisely dated in order to establish the sequence of events in the time scale. This almost never seems to be the case. Third, closcly spaced and synchronous data points are required if the extent of a particular type of climate is to be found, as would be important, for example, if one were trying to estimate the difference between the climatic state at the time in question versus that at present or at some other time. Although data are never sufficient for these purposes, progress is being made, at least to the point when an attempt can be made to sketch the climatic history of continents.
This chapter is only slightly modified from that of Frakes & Rich (1982). A useful companion to this summary is Frakes, McGowran & Bowler (1987). Reference to Fig. 1 will aid in location of major depositional areas discussed throughout the chapter.
PALAEOCLIMATE & PALAEOGEOGRAPHY OF AUSTRALIA - 113
A BRIEF HISTORY OF GLOBAL CLIMATES
The earliest known sedimentary rocks (as xenoliths in the Ishua Group, Greenland) include fragments of banded iron formation older than about 3,800 myBP. While these themselves are not diagnostic of climates of the time, somewhat younger rocks (~3,200 - 2,600 myBP) elsewhere are characterized by an abundance of carbonates, suggestive of warm climates. However, until latitudes of deposition are known for these strata, it is not possible to say whether the global situation was warm or otherwise. Although unlikely, the case may be that all carbonates of this interval were laid down in relatively low latitudes. Some oxygen isotope work on cherts also suggests quite warm climates (Knauth & Epstein 1976), but again at unspecified latitudes.
The earth's first glacial episode took place at around 2,500 - 2,300 million years ago (myBP), with large tracts of glacial debris being deposited in Canada (the Huronian sequence), South Africa (Witwatersrand Group, etc.) and possibly in Western Australia (Wyloo Group). In Canada the glaciation was multiple in that at least three glaciations are recorded. Following this and until the next known major glaciation beginning at about 1,000 myBP, climates once more seem to have been characterized by warmth and equability. The late Precambrian glaciations appear to have lasted about 400 my (from ~1,000 to 600 million years ago) and are known to have affected all continents with the exception of Antarctica, where geologic information is sparse. Interestingly, many tillite localities of this age were in relatively low latitudes, based on palacomagnetic data. It is likely that the late Precambrian was the coldest time in the history of the globe.
By the beginning of Phanerozoic time (Fig. 2), climates had warmed and glaciers had disappeared. What evidence is available suggests that all land masses were then at latitudes of less than 60°. The highest latitudes to which these warm climates extended is not known; however, warm-water indicators in shallow seas at 55° latitude imply a comparatively warm global situation. This is further suggested by a general lack of evidence of cold climates. The Ordovician Period (Fig. 3) seems to have been a time of fairly rapid oscillation of climate as suggested by variations in carbonate distribution and in eustatic sea level changes. Near the end of the Ordovician a major phase of glaciation affected Africa and marginal effects are seen in adjoining continents, including Europe and North America. This cold episode ended early in the Silurian (Fig. 4), and was followed by generally warm conditions.
The Devonian (Fig. 5) was a time of very great warmth on the globe, although there may have been limited glaciation in near-polar areas of South America. Late Devonian evaporites extend to about 40° palaeolatitude, at least 5° beyond their present area of formation. The aridity of the Devonian gave way to very humid conditions during the Carboniferous (Fig. 6) as deduced from the abundance of coals in North America, Europe and Asia. This global high humidity probably contributed to glaciation, which began in the middle Carboniferous, inasmuch as abundant precipitation on high-latitude land masses eventually led to the formation of glacier ice. The second half of the Carboniferous and the first quarter of the Permian (Fig. 7) saw glaciation spread over a large part of Gondwana. For unknown reasons this abruptly halted, and the globe again became relatively warm by the mid-Permian.
The earth apparently reached its thermal maximum during the Mesozoic Era (Figs 8, 9). In the Late Cretaceous, oxygen isotopes define two peaks of warmth, Albian and Coniacian- Santonian, the latter synchronous with the highest peak on the Phanerozoic sea level curve of Vail et al. (1977). The latest Cretaceous began the long and intermittent cooling which resulted ultimately in the Pleistocene glaciations (Figs 10, 11). Large temperature drops
Figure 1. Major tectonic and depositional features of the Australian continent during the Phanerozoic. (Derived from the Bur. Min. Res. Earth Science Atlas of Australia, Canberra, 1979).
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occurred in the oceans at the end of the Eocene and in the Middle Miocene, the latter apparently being the time during which most Antarctic ice accumulated. The last two million years has been characterized by advances and retreats of ice sheets in both hemispheres. Cooling of the oceans over the last 700,000 years operated on a cyclicity of about 100,000 years. The last interval of significant ice growth ended about 18,000 years ago.
PHANEROZOIC CLIMATES OF AUSTRALIA
The climates of Australia over the last 570 million years, during the history of vertebrates on the continent, are a reflection of two factors. Firstly, they reflect the variable palaeolatitudinal position of the continent and secondly the global climatic state. Climates of the continent at any given time can be expected to be varied owing to the great size of the land mass. However, in many cases geologic information on climates is limited to certain regions or to widely separated areas and generalizations about the whole continent accordingly are weak. Since dating of diagnostic sedimentary deposits commonly is imprecise, detailed description of short time-intervals is not yet possible. These limitations place constraints on interpretations of Australia's climatic history.
CAMBRIAN PERIOD
Climatically significant rocks of Cambrian age in Australia include only evaporites. Archaeocyathid limestones, oolitic or pisolitic limestones and red beds embrace warm palacoclimates amongst their possible depositional environments. For example, red beds probably represent deposition under warm conditions, at least when associated with evaporites, but they are known to form and to be diagenetically altered, under a variety of conditions. Accordingly, red beds and non-reefal limestones are interpreted with reservations herein.
Evaporites are known from the Ord Basin (Fig. 1) of northwest Australia and the Georgina Basin. These appear to be related to a widespread transgression of the sea, which began in the early Middle Cambrian and lasted into the Late Cambrian. Limestones and dolomites are common deposits resulting from this transgression and oolitic varieties possibly represent deposits of warm shallow seas (Bonaparte Gulf and Georgina basins, Adelaide Geosyncline). Red beds of Cambrian age include the Ayers Rock Arkose of the Northern Territory.
Palaeogeographic reconstructions vary in positioning Australia at this time (and other times) (e.g. Irving, 1964). However, all available ones place Australia in relatively low latitudes; the reconstruction in Fig. 2 shows Australia lying between about 5° and 40°N latitude. The east coast in this scheme should have been exposed to comparatively cold oceanic waters traversing down from high latitudes, but if so, any evidence is masked by the dominance of clastic sedimentation at this time. Localities at lower latitudes are characterized by warm water indicators, such as evaporites in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia, For areas where Cambrian strata are unknown, it can be predicted that most of the western half of the continent experienced tropical climates with abundant rainfall in the Cambrian and the southern areas, being more isolated from the sea, may have seen the develoment of desert climates. Strata of the Middle to Late Cambrian Dundas Group offer few clues to climatic conditions as most were deposited in deep water.
Finally, the Middle Cambrian may have been warmer than either the early or late parts of the period. This interpretation is based on the idea that the eustatic sea level rise in the Middle Cambrian corresponds to a slight global warming. However, the associated transgression of the sea, which occurs on other continents as well, may instead reflect increased tectonic activity in the oceans and a consequent decrease in the volume of ocean basins (Hallam, 1977).
PALAEOCLIMATE & PALAEOGEOGRAPHY OF AUSTRALIA - 117
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Figure 2. Palaeogeography and palaeoclimatic indicators for the Cambrian Period. Black triangles, reefs; black squares, evaporites, and black circles, coals; symbols apply to Figs 1-10. (Modified from Scotese et al. 1979).
ORDOVICIAN PERIOD
Ordovician epeiric seas occupied a broad belt across the continent from the Canning Basin southeastward to the Lachlan Fold Belt. However, sediments in these areas are mostly of Early and Middle Ordovician age. This is in keeping with the global sea-level scheme for the Ordovician proposed by Spjeldnaes (1961). Important deposits occur in the Canning and Georgina basins, the Lachlan Fold Belt and western Tasmania.
Most Ordovician deposits of Australia consist of dark shales and turbidites laid down in deep water, and these have little climatic significance.