In a groundbreaking discovery, a team of scientists led by Dr Matthew McCurry from the Australian Museum and UNSW Sydney has identified a new species of fossilised freshwater fish, discovered right in the Mudgee region.
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00:00My name is Dr Matthew McCurry and I'm the Curator of Paleontology at the Australian
00:08Museum and UNSW.
00:12So here we have a specimen of a fossil fish that was found near Golgon in New South Wales.
00:18It's a species that we've recently described in a scientific paper and so it's really exciting
00:23because it's a species that we haven't documented in the scientific literature before.
00:29It's a species called Ferroaspis.
00:32It's a really unique fish.
00:34It's an early diverging member of the Osmeriformes, which is just a scientific word for these
00:40group of fish that includes Australian graylings and smelts.
00:46One really interesting thing about this fish is that it's preserved in girtite.
00:50So it's this iron-rich rock.
00:51It's a type of rock where we haven't found well-preserved fossils until recently.
00:58One exciting thing about this fish is it's from the Miocene.
01:01It was preserved around 15 million years ago and we don't have a lot of fossil fish from
01:06that time.
01:07This is actually the only fossil of a whole body of a fish or a body fossil that we have
01:12from the Miocene.
01:15You can see here it's got lots of different features preserved, so fins, skin, the eyes
01:20preserved as well as the stomach.
01:23So this fossil is from a fossil site called McGrath's Flat.
01:27It's located near Golgong in New South Wales.
01:30It was found a couple of years ago as we were splitting rocks at this fossil site.
01:34You can see if you look at the side of this rock, it's a really finely laminated rock,
01:39so it's laid down in all of these different layers.
01:41What we do is we find these blocks of rock and then we split them with a hammer and chisel
01:45and find fossils within the layers.
01:48McGrath's Flat is a really exciting fossil site because we have a huge variety of animals
01:53and plants preserved.
01:54This is one of the species that were found at the site, but there's hundreds more to
01:57be described.
02:00There are a couple of unusual things about McGrath's Flat.
02:02One thing is the type of rock that the fossils are found in.
02:05So this type of rock is called girtite, it's a really iron-rich rock, and we wouldn't have
02:09expected to find really well-preserved fossils in this type of rock until we found this site.
02:16It's telling us about the types of places around the world that we might be able to
02:19look for more really amazing fossil sites like this.
02:23The other exciting thing about this fossil site is it preserves a period of time where
02:27Australia's going through this change in the environmental conditions.
02:31Australia's becoming more arid, more dry, and it's capturing the change in those ecosystems.
02:36So these fossils are all from a mesic rainforest ecosystem, it's very wet, it's really lush,
02:41but then around Gorgon today it's far more dry.
02:44So this fossil site's telling us about what those ecosystems were like before they became
02:48more arid.
02:50In terms of geographical area, this is quite a small fossil site.
02:54It's only found on one paddock within a farmer's property, but in terms of the number of fossils
02:58we're finding there, it's extremely productive.
03:01So it's telling us huge amounts of new information about those ecosystems and what they were
03:05like.
03:07One exciting thing about paleontology are there are spans of time where we don't understand
03:11a lot about what the ecosystems were like.
03:13So we don't have many fossil sites of the Miocene, and so the exciting thing here is
03:17we're getting new information about what species were like, which species had moved to Australia
03:23at this time, and what the environment was like as a whole.
03:26So I guess the exciting thing for me is putting new information into our understanding of
03:33what Australia has been like through time.