The arid heart of Australia may not easily support life now, but once, many aeons ago, it was lush and teeming. What is now arid desert and dry shrub- and grasslands was once thick with dense forests, alive with life.
In one of these grasslands, in the Central Tablelands of NSW, paleontologists have found new evidence of this abundance of life. A new fossil site that can most aptly be described as"exceptional" has turned up fossils of spiders, insects, fish, plants and even a bird feather, dating to the Miocene 11 to 16 million years ago.
Even more amazingly, it's a type of rock in which exceptional fossils are not usually seen, an iron-rich rock called goethite."We think that the process that turned these organisms into fossils is key to why they are so well preserved,"."Our analyses suggest that the fossils formed when iron-rich groundwaters drained into a billabong, and that a precipitation of iron minerals encased organisms that were living in or fell into the water.