Naracoorte, where a half-million years of biodiversity and climate history are trapped in caves
June 6, 2017 by Liz Reed And Lee Arnold, The Conversation
In 1857, guided by the flickering light of a candle deep in a cave at Naracoorte in South Australia, the Reverend Julian Tenison-Woods stumbled across thousands of tiny bones of rodents and small marsupials buried at the base of crystal columns.
Without knowing it, Woods had found a time machine of sorts – a record of biodiversity and environment spanning more than half a million years.
Now Naracoorte Caves are known as one of the world's best fossil sites, a place where marsupial lions, enormous kangaroos and giant monitor lizards met their deaths and were preserved by layers of sand.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-naracoorte-half-million-years-biodiversity-climate.html#jCp
