New Series in Development
Down Under Fossil Adventures
with Palaeo Paul
Strap yourselves in for a journey across Australia and deep into time with palaeontologist, Associate Professor Paul Willis (Palaeo Paul).
We’ll meet the characters who find fossils on their land, in their paddocks or deep in their mines. See the stunning remains of dinosaurs and other ancient beasts as they tell their stories. We’ll hear expert palaeontologists bring fossils back to life. And we’ll see how the history of life has shaped the Australia of today.
EPISODE 1
Dinosaurs of Fire
Dinosaurs of Fire crosses outback Australia to reveal the dazzling magic of opal fossils to the world. Along the way, we will save one small dinosaur whose bones are bursting with flashes of opal colour!
The rarest and most beautiful of fossils in the world are also the most endangered. 100-million-year-old remains of dinosaurs, marine reptiles, mammals and a whole menagerie of ancient creatures are preserved as Australia’s national gemstone – precious opal. And it’s this exquisite beauty, this internal flame of precious gemstone, that sees these unique specimens smashed to pieces and lost forever.
EPISODE 2
Mystery in the Dinosaurs Belly
This is a 100-million-year-old mystery that took 30 years to solve! It all started back in 1991 when Palaeo Paul was a graduate student searching for fossils in outback Queensland. What he found was a set of mysterious holes in the rocks filling the abdominal cavity of a large plant-eating dinosaur called Muttaburrasaurus. None of his palaeontologist peers had any idea what these holes were.
Fast forward to 2016 and Paul is made Adjunct Associate Professor in Palaeontology at Flinders University. Looking for some projects to pick up, he revisited the holes in the belly of the dinosaur.
EPISODE 3
People Powered Palaeontology
All across Australia keen amateur palaeontologists are making spectacular finds that are forging a new understanding of our past. This is a unique quality of palaeontology as a science: a gifted amateur or a lucky find can thrust anyone to the edge of our knowledge about the past!
We start with the first find of a dinosaur in Australia on the coast of Victoria in 1902 and the follow up 70 years later when two schoolboys found another dinosaur bone in the area. We drop in on Dinosaur Dreaming, where anybody can join in and keep that dinosaur hunt alive. We follow a husband-and-wife team of gifted amateur fossil hunters as they scour the floor of an ancient sea searching out marine reptiles. At Riversleigh in northeast Queensland we follow some of the volunteers that help out with the annual excavations and find out what it’s like to be part of a world-class fossil dig! Then on the Darling Downs in southern Queensland we tag along with a couple of keen locals who spend their recreational time scouring local creek beds in search of more treasures from the past. And, we go to Jenolan Caves in NSW to meet cave guides turned fossil hunters looking for deposits left behind by ancient owls.
EPISODE 4
Dinosaurs that saved the Outback
In the remote town of Winton in outback Queensland local station owner David Elliot stumbled across his first dinosaur fossil while rounding up sheep. But, instead of sending the bone off to the museum in Brisbane as had been happening for over 100 years, David wanted to keep his find in the local area. Now the The Age of Dinosaurs Museum just outside of town is a major tourist attraction and has helped to carry the town through the most severe drought the area has ever experienced.
This Museum is now part of a Dinosaur Trail that stretches across outback Queensland taking tourists between iconic outback towns in search of the past. We venture south to Eromanga and view the huge remains of Australotitan – Australia’s largest dinosaur. At the other end of the Dinosaur Trail is Kronosaurus Korner, a regional fossil museum in Richmond, Qld.
We then venture further back in time to the Age of Fish and the small country town of Canowindra, NSW where a major find of 360 million-year-old fossil fish has beathed new life into town.
EPISODE 5
Life gets started
Australia is unique in being able to chart the first 3 billion years of life in its fossil deposits. From the oldest evidence of life on earth in the rugged Pilbara region of Western Australia where palaeobiologist Bonnie Teece shows us the oldest fossils on the planet. We then find ourselves at the bottom of one of Western Australia’s massive iron ore mines. This represents the next big step in the history of the rise of life on Earth when the rise in oxygen mad the planet rust.
Shark Bay in Western Australia houses the most impressive collection of living stromatolites on the planet. For most of the last 2 billion years, these were the most complex forms of life on earth and we go from Shark Bay into outback WA to see fossils of these formations that have remained unchanged through the aeons of time.
In the Flinders Ranges, SA, we witness an event that almost wiped-out life on Earth when the whole planet was buried in ice. But the eventual thaw of that global snowball supercharged the revitalised march of life and soon after we find the first multicellular life around the nearby Ediacara Hills.
We conclude our journey through the rise of life with an event some 550 million years ago, known as the Cambrian Explosion, that produced all the major groups of animals we are familiar with today. We visit a Kangaroo Island, SA, that records the world-changing event.
EPISODE 6
Crocodiles Down Under
Palaeo Paul cut his teeth as a palaeontologist studying Australia’s fossil crocodiles. By the time Paul had finished his PhD, he had described 22 new species of crocodile and realised that most of them were closely related to each other – a product of Australia’s isolation from the rest of the world for much of the last 40 million years. Paul also discovered that this group had diversified into unusual forms including some land-dwelling forms and some small species that may have climbed trees!
This is voyage of discovery across the crocodiles of ancient Australia and introduces some magnificent animals! We travel to Isisford in northern Queensland and view Australia’s oldest croc, possibly the granddaddy of all living crocodiles, alligators and gharials. At Murgon we meet a couple of species of crocs living side-by-side in an ancient lagoon, probably the ancestors of many beasts yet to come. We go back to Riversleigh and stalk ancient rainforests looking for tree-dwelling crocs. We venture to Alcoota in the Northern Territory to view the hatch-headed beast that terrorised the largest birds that ever lived. And then back to the Darling Downs in search of mega crocs that fed on the megafauna as well as the largest croc ever recorded from Australia – a 9-metre-long behemoth that ate fish.
We finish with a conundrum: how did little tree dwelling crocs disperse from Australian across the South Pacific? We now find their remains in very recent deposits in New Caledonia and Vanuatu but how they got there is a mystery worthy of investigation!
