Dimensions
216 x 279 x 13mm
A History of Australia's Backboned Animals
Today, Australia's animals and plants are some of the weirdest in the world - so very different from those on all other continents. Even so, there is in the past of Australia a "Lost World" of even stranger beasts and blooms that would never have been dreamed of if it had not been for the work of fossil hunters, palaeontologists, over the last two centuries - mostly in the last fifty years. Minute single-celled forms from the Macdonnell Ranges over 3 thousand million years old, bizarre impressions in 600 million year old beach sands preserved in the Flinders ranges of South Australia, massive armoured fish more than 300 million years old from an ancient barrier reef now exposed on remote Gogo Station in Western Australia and night-visioned, tiny dinosaurs from the polar reaches of southern Victorian 120 million years ago - all are the denizens of "Australia's Lost World" - only recently revealed. This book explores many part of this lost world and brings it to life with a series of stories and facts put together by two practising palaeontologists and their daughter.
