Word: riversleigh
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...mellifluous tones that have captivated generations of science students, the Australian-born, Princeton-educated Archer, dean of science at the University of New South Wales, will speak for an hour, without a stumble or misplaced word, about the scope of discovery at World Heritage?listed Riversleigh and the strange beasts that used to live here. In 1983, Archer says, "in one rock, in five minutes, we found 35 new kinds of mammal. Not just species - like one kind of kangaroo versus another - but whole groups of things that are as unique as, say, whales are." Two years ago, Nissen...
...team is patient with neophytes fascinated by Riversleigh's extinct megafauna (though many of these creatures were known already from deposits elsewhere in Australia), among them the rhinoceros-sized Diprotodon optatum, distantly related to the wombat; and the 3-m tall, 400-kg flightless bird Dromornis stirtoni, which had a beak large and sharp enough to tear the flesh off a kangaroo, if not as a predator then as a scavenger. Extracting the fossils of such creatures is harder than finding them. These palaeontologists aren't eggheads: they spend seven hours each day under a scorching sun levering boulders...
...whose father is a high-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...
...nice sideshow, but Archer and others are focused these days on something bigger. Reflecting on nearly three decades of Riversleigh exploration, "We were at first knocked out," he says, "by the simple, stunning biodiversity that we were finding." But in using Riversleigh to track the evolution of local fauna over millions of years, Archer began to grasp its predictive power. Riversleigh, he says, has changed ideas about which creatures should be seen as endangered. Here, the news is good, bad . . . and dire. The koala, for example, appears safer than conservationists had imagined. Its population and habitat have shrunk...
...diminished over millions of years in number, spread and diversity. Now, Archer says, all that's left is "these toothless platypuses confined to a few river systems in eastern Australia." The animal's record reminds palaeontologists of that of the thylacines. Eight types used to roam the Riversleigh rainforests; the last type, the Tasmanian tiger, became extinct in the 1930s. "What we're saying," says Archer, "is, 'O.K., we failed that one. Let's learn from the thylacine. Don't take (the platypus) for granted, because if you push it, it's likely to vanish.'" But the threat is much...