Gondwanan wildlife

The reason we were on the Barham River Rd at Apollo Bay (see previous post) was that we went to the Wildlife of Gondwana exhibition. We'd left it until the last minute - it closed today - but I'm very glad we didn't miss it.

Dinosaurs have been blasted (yes, blasted!) from the rocks on the coast west of Cape Otway and some exciting discoveries made, so palaeontologists and Monash University set up this wonderful display of fossils and cast fossils from Gondwana. A group of locals is hoping that a permanent museum can be established in the future and I reckon it would be successful given the number of people who visit the Great Ocean Road each year.

Plants that dinosaurs ate - the vegetation in polar Victoria (in the Early Cretaceous period) was dominated by ferns, evergreens and gingkoes. (Boola Boola, Gippsland.) OK, I admit I'm not that knowledgeable - I'm quoting from the label!

Peter Trusler won the Eureka Prize (and achieved the front page of Time magazine) for this painting he did for Australia Post. They released it as a stamp series in 1993. It depicts Australian dinosaurs with intriguing names such as Muttaburrasaurus, Minmi and Timimus.

Riversleigh

Part of the Lawn Hill National Park is a World Heritage site. For twenty years scientists have been searching the fossil deposits at Riversleigh that document terrestrial fauna and ecosystems 15-25 million years ago. One section is open to the public and is well worth the effort of getting there. We drove south from Lawn Hill gorge for about 50 kms on a dusty and rocky road with several river crossings. There were several other cars there when we arrived but after they left we had the entire place to ourselves. What a vast unpopulated country we live in.

From the road the information centre is almost invisible - it's been designed to look like a pile of rocks - and is formed like a cave inside. The information panels in the cave and on the 800 m walk are excellent. We read the illustrated panel and then saw the exact same fossil in the rock 'in situ' alongside. This is the turtle and there were about eight other animal fossils on the walk as well as information about the rocks and geology.

Fairy Martins had taken possession of the centre's ceiling and when we were inside we could hear a gecko clicking somewhere above us.

The drive down was really interesting as well. Huge termite mounds, cattle, the changing geology, river crossings, many birds including numerous flocks of budgies. There's always something of interest to look at.

We had our lunch at a little river crossing, flowing quite swiftly from a spring upstream, and ended up staying there all afternoon. It was so peaceful and I counted over twenty species of birds without moving from my deck chair. Many were coming down to the water to drink (Double-barred Finches, Crimson Finches, Painted Button-quails, White-gaped Honeyeaters, Yellow-tinted Honeyeaters, Rufous-throated Honeyeaters) and others were feeding in the trees and shrubs - some of which were flowering (Great Bowerbird, Black-chinned Honeyeater, Buff-sided Robin, Red-winged Parrot, Rufous Whistlers, White-bellied Cuckoo-shrike). A Brolga waded down the creek towards us before veering off into the grass, Budgerigars and Black Kites flew overhead, the ubiquitous Willie Wagtails and Magpielarks were entertaining as usual and the noisiest of all were the Restless Flycatchers. The Brown Quails were a delight, walking in a little covey of about seven to the water to drink - of course the camera was in the car but then I don't generally do bird photos.

Termite mounds

Our lunch site. Magic.

Bauhinia cunninghamia Bauhinia (Bean Tree), a semi-deciduous tree flowering near the creek.

A fossiliferous quarry

Today, armed with our knives and screwdrivers and geology hammers, we visited Batesford Quarry on the outskirts of Geelong.

The quarry is the type locality of Batesford Limestone, a biocalcarenite consisting of broken skeletal remains of bryozoans, echinoides and bivalves. It accumulated in a clear water marine environment with a sandy sea floor in the Miocene period. We went there to look for the fossils.

It's a very large and deep quarry, no longer operating (although there are several smaller mining industries on site). The Moorabool River runs down one side of it but no longer is on on its original course. The quarry managers diverted it in order to access the limestone. The industrial archeolgy is very interesing too, but we weren't concentrating on that. We wanted to find sharks teeth.

It's astonishing to think that you can chip off a limestone chunk and expose almost intact fossils of marine creatures that were alive 15 million years ago, creatures that look like those we find on sea shores today like sea urchins, cowie shells, bivalves, sponges and coral. And yes, we found a few shark teeth. It was a most interesting excursion.

A geologist called David Williams has written an interesting blog about finding a new species of barnacle in the wall of a building in Melbourne that is faced with Batesford Limestone.
http://stories-in-stone.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html