A fossil “treasure trove” located within New South Wales recently revealed its findings, with stunning specimens of fossilized feathers, spiders, and fish, among others. The site, a piece of private land named McGraths Flat, was discovered back in 2017 by Nigel McGrath, a farmer who reportedly found a fossilized leaf nearby while working out in the field. Now, years later, the team of scientists working onsite published their findings in the journal Science Advances.
The team responsible for the findings consisted of some 15 scientists, covering vast expanses of expertise from botany and mineralogy to biostratigraphy. The site, on the other hand, yielded so many fossils of high quality that it was classified as a “Lagerstätte”, German for “storage site.”
The fossils revealed by the scientists showcase a world that’s distant from what is now one of the aridest parts of Australia, hence its ominous nickname of being Australia’s “dead heart.” Instead of fossils from a dry landscape, the animals and fossils obtained revealed a pretty tropical environment, with trees and vegetation all around.
“This site gives us unprecedented insight into what these ecosystems were like,” said lead author and Australian Museum (AM) curator of paleontology Matthew McCurry to news source LiveScience. “We now know how diverse these ecosystems were, which species lived in them and how these species interacted.”
To image these fossils, Associate Professor Michael Frese used a combination of stacking microphotography and scanning electron microscopy to produce brilliant and detailed images of these fascinating finds, which have been dated back to the Miocene epoch, a section of geologic time between 23 and 5 million years ago.
Frese continued: “The fossils also preserve evidence of interactions between species. For instance, we have fish stomach contents preserved in the fish, meaning that we can figure out what they were eating. We have also found examples of pollen preserved on the bodies of insects so we can tell which species were pollinating which plants.”
Not all things looked well and good for the ancient Miocene ecosystem, now frozen in time. “The pollen we found in the sediment suggests that there might have been drier habitats surrounding the wetter rainforest, indicating a change to drier conditions,” McCurry mentioned, which were clues to what may have been the remains of a Miocene forest that were slowly drying out.
Professor David Cantrill, Executive Director of Science at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Victoria, also noted that the fossils obtained from the site give crucial insights into a past world that was drying up—a world that can give us clues into our own modern climate state. Cantrill continued in a statement to SciTechDaily: “The McGraths Flat plant fossils give us a window into the vegetation and ecosystems of a warmer world, one that we are likely to experience in the future.”
“[This] site is extremely valuable in what it tells us about the evolutionary history of this part of the world. It provides further evidence of changing climates and helps fill the gaps in our knowledge of that time and region,” added AM Chief Scientist and museum Research Institute director Professor Kristofer Helgen.
Helgen continued: “The AM has a rich history of expeditions and scientific research, and we love that the public is always fascinated by these fundamental human endeavors of exploration and discovery.”
The findings from McGraths Flat will be stored in AM’s paleontology collection, where scientists can examine them for future study.
(For more exquisite fossil finds, check out this particularly well-preserved ammonite fossil. Afterward, read further about what may be dinosaur cells preserved in 125-million-year-old fossils.)
References
- Australian Museum. (2022, January 7). Life in the “dead” heart of australia – incredible new “lagerstätte” fossil site discovered. SciTechDaily. https://scitechdaily.com/life-in-the-dead-heart-of-australia-incredible-new-lagerstatte-fossil-site-discovered/
- McCurry, M. R., Cantrill, D. J., Smith, P. M., Beattie, R., Dettmann, M., Baranov, V., Magee, C., Nguyen, J. M. T., Forster, M. A., Hinde, J., Pogson, R., Wang, H., Marjo, C. E., Vasconcelos, P., & Frese, M. (2022). A Lagerstätte from Australia provides insight into the nature of Miocene mesic ecosystems. Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abm1406
- Vince, C. (2022, January 8). Life in the ‘dead’ heart of Australia. The Australian Museum. https://australian.museum/about/organisation/media-centre/life-in-dead-heart-of-australia/australian.museum/about/organisation/media-centre/life-in-dead-heart-of-australia/
- Weisberger, M. (2022, January 7). Rare and fragile fossils found at a secret site in Australia’s ‘dead heart’. LiveScience. https://www.livescience.com/secret-fossils-australia-spiders
