Organising a bunch of meetings at
a number of rural museums, some of the staff of the National Dinosaur Museum
jumped in the car for the (roughly) 800 km round trip to visit the Age of
Fishes museum at Canowindra, the Australia Fossil and Mineral museum at
Bathurst and the Wellington Caves in Wellington.
Heading out into rural NSW on a
hot 36 °C (97 °F) day, we drove through Cowra, a region where the armoured
placoderm fish, Cowralepis, was unearthed in Devonian rocks. After a meeting
with the great staff at the Age of Fishes (more about this later), we headed
for Bathurst but found ourselves somehow closer to Wellington.
Deciding to visit here first, then the Bathurst museum on the way home, we headed north and soon found ourselves driving through a strange landscape of sunburnt grasses covering rolling hills.
Parking the car under the nearest tree to keep the thing out of the sun,
we began inspecting the closest rocks. These were human sized boulders (at
least, they may have been, they were partially buried), made up of a very hard,
grey rock. Though these had mostly plain rock faces (there were a few
interesting inclusions), we soon came across a large limestone boulder of a
lighter colour. Here, we struck pay dirt.
Deciding to visit here first, then the Bathurst museum on the way home, we headed north and soon found ourselves driving through a strange landscape of sunburnt grasses covering rolling hills.
We soon drove through a small
town, Molong, and on the other side began noticing large, weathered boulders
crowning a number of hills; boulders that looked a lot like limestone- a
renowned fossiliferous rock. When some of these appeared on the roadside of the
barbed wire fences we had been driving beside since the town, we all agreed it
was time to get out and have a look.
This boulder was not only full of
corals and shards of shell, there was a great layer of bryozoans, a marine
creature that lives in colonies and resembles coral, though they are not
actually corals. Sadly, this rock was far too large to place in the car and
bring back to the museum, so we locked in the location on the GPS and will be
heading back out to pick up the piece to put on display at the NDM, so keep an
eye out for that.
Time was short so we were soon on
the road and heading for the Wellington Caves, which I will cover in the next
article. I have done a little
investigating, and the location seems to have been a large reef system during
the Silurian, but we will hopefully know more once we bring the rock back.
