Riversleigh 2009

By Phil Creaser
18 July 2009

Following a highly successful CAVEPS conference held at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), some conference participants joined the team from UNSW for the annual trip to the Riversleigh World Heritage site north of Mt Isa.

While only in the field for a week, many new and exciting finds were made.

After some exploring around the AL90 site and some collecting from the bat rich Dome Site, most of the work centred on the Neville’s Garden Site which was last collected from in the early 1990s.

Excavating this site appeared to reveal at least two different fossil horizons which produced a wide range of terrestrial mammals, large flightless birds and an aquatic fauna with turtles, crocodiles and lungfish.

Among the special finds were the endocast of a brain from a large bird and a small turtle.

In addition to the work at Riversleigh, a small party also collected from younger sites on the Leichhardt River where megafauna fossils had been found previously. Again, a number of excellent specimens were found including the skull of the giant kangaroo Protemnodon and jaws from the giant herbivore Euryzygoma.

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