Canowindra has hosted palaeontology students eager to explore our significant fish fossil site and museum.
A Flinders University team spent time at the site of the 1990s fossil discovery as well as the Age of Fishes Museum.
For Dr Alice Clement and more than 25 third-year palaeontology students, it was an incredible opportunity.
“It’s one of the sites that you hear about and read about in all of your studies and work, this is a site of exceptional preservation,” Dr Clement said.
“This was my first visit, actually, so it was very exciting to go there.”
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Dr Clement is a palaeontologist whose work is focussed on fish in Devonian era some 400 million years ago – often referred to as “the age of fishes” for the explosion of fish diversity of that time.
Towards the end of that era is where tetrapods or land animals emerge, but the Canowindra fossil site captures a moment in time about 363 million years ago.
Visiting gave students the chance to look at the local geology and use field technique as well as work in the museum.
“We visited the actual dig site, which was really nice, to get the context of where the fossils are coming from,” Dr Clement said.
“There was a new specimen that hadn’t been identified before and we could take a silicone peel of it –and this captures some of the details of the bones that are exposed.”
PhD student Austin Fitzpatrick’s work is focused on describing this new new species of Groenlandaspis, a species of placoderm that is known from all over the world.
Placoderm are considered the most primitive of the jawed fish, Austin explained, and while they were the dominant predators on earth for some 60 million years they became extinct at the end of the Devonian era.
“They’re often also called armoured fish, their skeleton composes mainly of boney interlocking plates that sort of look like armour,” Austin said.
The fish he’s working on is medium sized, about 40 to 50cm, made unique by its very high dorsal fin.
The university team also spent time at the museum both looking at the impressive displays and working in the collections store, using digital light scanning to learn about digitising the discoveries.
“Technology is coming on leaps and bounds of course and it’s amazing the things we can do with fossil specimens these days,” Dr Clement said.
“What it means is that even if specimens were discovered 50 or 100 years ago, we can now revisit them and get all this new information that wasn’t previously available.
“You can look inside rock, inside specimens, to get internal details.”
Not only can scientists use analyses of the digital models they create to look at function, movement and ecology, they can use it to create videos and animations and share their research online.
“It’s really bolstering science,” Dr Clement said.
Dr Clement also conducted a community presentation which was well-attended, shining the spotlight of the scientific importance of what’s right here in Canowindra in context.
“Its name is known by people around the world in terms of people who like fossil fish - and fossil fish are really important because you can’t understand any of the backboned animals without understanding fish and where we all came from,” she said.
Dr David McGrath, who now owns the property, welcomed the team to Canowindra.
He hopes to continue to protect the site and continue with it for education and research.
