Word: palaeontologist
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Dates: during 2004-2004
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...golf course where you can't help but shoot sub-par. Bones abound: even the untrained eye can spot them protruding from the gray limestone outcrops. In an area of 40 sq. km, Archer's teams have found and named hundreds of sites since 1976, when he and palaeontologist Henk Godthelp decided to check out reports that Riversleigh - then a cattle station, now part of Lawn Hill National Park - might contain valuable fossils. And it did - in the same way that the Louvre could be said to house some nice paintings. Riversleigh has since provided an annual bounty of exquisitely...
...school geology teacher. Between them, they brush rocks, sort and label them, and treat fossils with a preservative. Everyone lugs rock-filled hessian bags to a pick-up point, from where they're eventually trucked to laboratories in Sydney and at Mount Isa's Riversleigh Fossil Centre. There, resident palaeontologist John Scanlon frees the bones by dissolving the surrounding limestone in dilute acetic acid. Since the vats were installed earlier this year, "I've just been hooked," says Scanlon, who at 12 became fascinated with Australian snakes and is now Australia's leading expert on the fossilized type. He holds...