Word: riversleigh
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...Riversleigh's vast trove of fossils lets scientists see deep into the past - and unearth lessons for the future A certain type of person might regard Phil Creaser's life as a tiny bit humdrum. Fair-skinned and bespectacled, he works from a desk as a project coordinator in the Commonwealth public service, returning in the evenings to an empty house. In his free time, he keeps an eye on his elderly parents, loves a good trivia night, and has drinks every Friday evening with longstanding colleagues. Sporting interests? You bet: orienteering and rogaining, activities that allow him to indulge...
...crack hammer, which is poised over a piece of rock the size of two bricks. What's inside the rock will make Creaser's day and remind the rest of the party that, for all the wonders this place has yielded, it has much more to give. "Work at Riversleigh," says team leader Mike Archer, "will go on forever...
...Creaser is entitled to feel hopeful as he takes aim. As fossil deposits go, Riversleigh is like a 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...
...lately Archer, among others, has begun to view Riversleigh as more than just a portal into the ancient past. It is also, he believes, a harbinger. In stunning detail, Riversleigh chronicles a collapse in Australia's mammal diversity in the past 25 million years. Archer warns that if humans don't stop abusing the earth and "incarcerating our precious biotas in reserves that are demonstrably too small to sustain them," we could jeopardize our survival as a species. Alarmist? Keep in mind, he suggests, that the average mammalian species hangs around for 5 million years; Homo sapiens has been around...
...From there, it's a 40-min. drive each morning to Riversleigh. Only one of the sites - D site - is open to the public. None of the others is marked, and their precise locations are kept secret to thwart looters and vandals. In all directions as far as the eye can see, Riversleigh is piles of stone, spinifex, scraggy trees and termite mounds. Apart from local Aborigines and the odd ranger, Archer's teams are the only people who set foot on this land. So how do they know their way around? Here, rogainer Creaser more than earns his keep...