While we can travel around the world, we can’t move around in time… unless you imagine it through fossils and geological clues. Evrim Yazgin’s article was originally published in the Cosmos Print Magazine, September 2024.
Where most people see a weirdly shaped rock, a palaeontologist might see how an animal lived and died millions of years ago. So how can that keen expert vision be brought to the general public?
Transporting people back in time through scientific discovery is exactly what spaces such as museums aim to do. And Melbourne Museum has a permanent exhibition that tries to get visitors to imagine what it would be like to walk through time in the Australian state of Victoria.
Credit: Museums Victoria, Designer David Bleja.
Unfathomable time
I am greeted by a large wall with the exhibition’s name: “600 Million Years: Victoria Evolves”. We all know 600 million years is a long time. But just how long is mind boggling.
If 600 million years were shrunk down to a year, then the 300,000 years or so that modern humans have been around would amount to less than 4.5 hours. The Pyramids of Giza (which are about 4,500 years old) would have appeared less than four minutes before the year was up.
Even the mighty dinosaurs were only around for about a quarter of that 600-million-year time.
To help explain representing such a vast amount of time in an exhibition, I am welcomed by Kate Phillips, Melbourne Museum’s senior curator of science exhibitions.
Phillips led the team which put the “Victoria Evolves” exhibition together – a project which was finished in 2011.
“We have a few interpretive devices to help orient people in time,” Phillips says, pointing to a series of maps which estimate how the continents moved and shorelines changed over the aeons.
“So, this was the year that life evolved in the oceans, but it’s pretty mind boggling when you’ve got that many zeroes. And you can’t recognise anything about that bit of land. Where on Earth was Victoria? It was, in fact, under the water,” she laughs.
Phillips is one part of a team which includes designers who produce graphics, people who create mounts and handle objects, preparators who make models and do taxidermy, and specialists who create films and interactive media.
She takes me to a large knob which, when turned, animates another map. “We have more interactive elements which orient people.” Turn the knob far enough and you reach the Ediacaran period (635–541 million years ago), when the first complex life emerged.
I am then joined by Dr Erich Fitzgerald, Melbourne Museum’s senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology.
As Erich meets me at the entrance to the exhibition, his first question throws me off guard. “Do you want to do the standard forwards through time, or would you rather go back in time?” he asks.
I honestly hadn’t thought about it.
Going backwards allows you to start with the familiar and end up seeing how strange this part of the world was hundreds of millions of years ago. On the other hand, going forward you start with the alien ancient world and see how this develops into the Victoria we see today.
That the exhibition allows you to go forwards, backwards and even bounce around between the ancient to the modern is testament to this powerful tool for understanding the vast changes over millions of years.
With some existential angst, we decide to travel forwards from 600 million years ago.
Dr Erich Fitzgerald, Melbourne Museum’s senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology. Credit: Benjamin Healley, Museums Victoria.
Victoria: The early years
“The fossil record of Victoria can conveniently be divided into four parts,” Fitzgerald notes.
Taking just a few steps in the exhibition, we jump forward about 200 million years.
“It’s only from around about the Devonian where we have fossils that we might start to recognise and I’m going to focus on the vertebrates, because that’s my specialty,” he says with a wry smile.
The Devonian period (420–359 million years ago) is often called the ‘Age of Fishes.’
Much of Victoria is still under water. Globally, it is much warmer than today and oxygen levels lower. In this corner of Australia, some of earliest examples of land plants can also be found. Some of them grew tall – but they weren’t trees. They were related to today’s mosses and lichens.
A fossil of one of these ancient Victorian plants, Baragwanathia, is displayed next to its modern relative.
Vertebrates – animals with a backbone – were beginning to assert themselves and diversify.
“Fishes are the dominant vertebrates worldwide,” Fitzgerald says. But he notes a major shift taking place. “Vertebrates are just starting to invade the land.”
“In Victoria, we have amazing fossils,” he says. “Perhaps the most exciting and tantalising is from a late Devonian site over in the far eastern corner at a place called the Genoa River. And here we have a cast replica of it.”
Fitzgerald points at what at first looks like a slab of dirt.
Genoa trackway fossilised slab of mud featuring two sets of footprints with individual fingers and toes, and sweep marks from a tetrapod’s belly. Credit: Peter Nearhos, Museums Victoria.
“It’s actually not bones. It’s not teeth. They’re footprints. They’re fossil trackways of what are some of the earliest evidence of tetrapods – otherwise known as four-limbed vertebrates which, of course, includes us.”
On closer inspection, though the weathered indentations don’t look exactly like footprints, the trackway is clear.
“It’s, in some ways, one of the most underrated fossils in Australia,” he says.
“You can see paired tracks. We think of these early tetrapods possibly not even walking on land, but even in the shallows. This could be impressions into soft sand or mud below the water’s surface, or even along the shoreline. They’re moving their body from side to side, much like a fish swims,” Fitzgerald explains.
To help illustrate the point, behind the trackway is a 3D model of a four-legged amphibian with strong flippers which could have been used to haul itself out of the water and traverse the muddy landscape nearly 400 million years ago.
Behind this funny looking fish are other 3D models showing how these ancient vertebrates would have evolved over millions of years to make the transition from water to land.
And behind them is not another model, but a real life pair of lungfish from Queensland. These “living fossils” are fish which have fully-developed, air-breathing lungs – considered a vital element in the ability of ancient fish to colonise land. Lungfish fossils more than 300 million years old are virtually no different to the living examples of today. And both can be found in eastern Australia.
As if the trackway wasn’t cool enough, Fitzgerald notes that multiple such fossils have been found in Victoria, made by different species.
“It’s tantalising evidence that already there’s a relatively complex community in these tetrapods back then at the dawn of four-limbed vertebrates,” Fitzgerald notes. “I consider it one of the most internationally, scientifically significant aspects of the palaeontology of Australia and Victoria.”
Near the end of the Devonian period, 385 million years ago, the first trees began to populate the Earth. Credit: Artist Walter Myers, Source Arcadia Street.
In the shadows of dinosaurs
A few strides push us another 250 million years forward in time to the heyday of the dinosaurs.
Fitzgerald notes that the fossil record in Victoria is limited until about 150 million years ago. What happened in that large gap? Oh, nothing much. Just another 200 million years of evolution, the Permian mass extinction event which saw 90% of life on Earth eradicated and the emergence of dinosaurs as the dominant vertebrates on the planet.
By the time we reach the Cretaceous period (145–66 million years ago) on our journey through time, Victoria has attached itself to Antarctica and is in the southern polar circle.
While the global climate was much warmer, meaning no ice caps at the poles, these polar environments were not exactly what you would imagine when you think of dinosaurs.
“For three to six months of the year, Victoria is in total or near darkness at this time,” Fitzgerald says. “There were thick forests and enormous rivers on the scale of the Mississippi.”
“We find fossils from this polar world of forests and swamps. Of course, their most famous representatives are dinosaurs,” Fitzgerald notes.
This Qantassaurus animatronics display is part of the 600 Million Years exhibition at Melbourne Museum. Credit: Jon Augier, Museums Victoria.
Among these polar dinosaurs of Victoria are small plant eaters such as Leaellynasaura and Qantassaurus. Australia’s top predatory dinosaur, a type of megaraptorid, also lived in Victoria about 120 million years ago. These predators probably grew to about six metres in length and had large forearms with massive claws, likely for slashing at prey.
Other animals shared this strange ancient landscape in Victoria. Among them is the crocodile-sized amphibian Koolasuchus.
But Fitzgerald is keen to show me the other inhabitants of Cretaceous Victoria.
“Scientifically, it’s not the dinosaurs, in some ways, that are most important from that time,” he says. “The next sort of global ‘box office hit’ of scientific significance are actually some of the most inconspicuous. These are Australia’s oldest mammal fossils.”
Fitzgerald shows me some fossil jaw bones – no larger than a human thumbnail. The animals themselves would have been tiny shrew or mouse-like creatures which could fit in the palm of your hand.
“Now, of course, we have to be careful of being labelled with mammalian chauvinism. And I am a palaeomammalogist, so I am biased,” Fitzgerald laughs. “But the tiny size of these fossils belies their international scientific significance.
“What’s interesting is that there’s so many different species found in Victoria. Many of them are monotremes – relatives of today’s platypus and echidnas. Others are, frankly, mysterious and highly controversial in terms of exactly what kind of mammal they are.”
He notes that the fossil sites of Victoria’s ancient polar rainforests also show signs of birds, turtles, flying reptiles and fishes. “It paints a picture of a really diverse ecosystem with no modern analogue.”
Australia’s oldest pterosaurs. Credit: Peter Trusler.
Pterosaurs of the polar wilderness
Australia’s oldest pterosaur comes from Victoria’s ancient polar wilderness. Pterosaurs were flying reptiles which lived alongside dinosaurs and went extinct 66 million years ago. They include species as small as pigeons, to the largest animals to ever have flown.
The biggest had a wingspan of more than 10 metres and stood as tall as a giraffe. In Australia, however, pterosaur fossils are few and far between.
Last year, Adele Pentland, a PhD candidate at Western Australia’s Curtin University, led research on Australia’s oldest pterosaur fossils – found on Victoria’s coast.
“The bones belonged to two separate pterosaur individuals,” Pentland says. “We can be confident of this because of the relative size difference between the partial pelvis and wing bone that was found.”
The larger animal had a wingspan of more than two metres.
“The smaller specimen is the first evidence of a juvenile pterosaur found in Australia, with an estimated wingspan just over one metre,” she adds.
Pentland’s pterosaurs would have flown over the landscape 110–107 million years ago. “Instead of eucalyptus forests and grasses,” she says, they would have soared over “conifers and gingkoes.”
“Compared with the dinosaurs that lived in Victoria 107 million years ago, relatively little is known about the pterosaurs,” Pentland notes. “There are still a myriad of questions that remain unanswered.”
A whale of a time in ancient Victoria
“Our next major window kicks in about 30 million years ago,” Fitzgerald says as he takes me to a nook in the exhibition space.
He notes that 34 million years ago, there was a major turning point in the history of Earth’s climate centred around Australia.
The ‘unzipping’ of Australia from Antarctica caused the Southern Ocean to encircle Antarctica, isolating it from warm currents going south. As a result, ice built up on Antarctica. As ice builds up, it causes an ‘Albedo effect’ where the ice reflects sunlight, fast-tracking an overall cooling of the global climate.
“We flipped from a long-term trend of true greenhouse climatic conditions to what we call a ‘cool house’ world,” Fitzgerald says. “Rainforests and jungles recede around the globe. And in the oceans, there’s a huge increase in primary productivity. Lots of nutrients, lots more plankton and stronger cold currents wash over the coast of ancient Victoria.”
“That spawns the earliest evolution of today’s largest living animals: whales. And in Victoria, we capture their earliest stories.”
About 300 million years after the ancestors of four-limbed vertebrates took the first pioneering steps onto land, captured at the Genoa River, the ancestors of whales high-tailed it back into the water.
These strange dog- or bear-like creatures evolved over tens of millions of years to become whales and dolphins.
“The animals living in the ocean at that time are at first sight familiar, but also quite strange,” Fitzgerald says. “There are whales like Janjucetus, but they don’t really quite look like any living whales.”
Janjucetus was discovered on Victoria’s southwest coast near the surfing town of Jan Juc. It lived about 25 million years ago, grew to about three metres long, had big eyes for its size and large flippers.
“It’s teeth are unlike that of any living whale,” Fitzgerald says. “They’re very complex. They have almost leaf shaped serrations on them. And most bizarrely, these are the earliest relatives or cousins of today’s blue whale.”
“This fossil showed us there was an entire chapter in the history of whales that no one ever thought existed,” he adds. “So this is the third ‘big hit’ in Victorian palaeontology.”
Fully in his element now, Fitzgerald tells me all about Victoria’s ancient whales.
He takes me into the backrooms where there is no public access to have a look at some real fossils (not the casts and replicas which often inhabit exhibitions) found in Victoria.
Fitzgerald estimates that 90% of the Melbourne Museum’s fossils are from Victoria. Whatever the exact percentage, he says Victorian fossils make up the “vast majority”.
He pulls out the fossil tooth of an extinct Victorian relative of today’s sperm whales, similar to those found of Livyatan melvillei in South America.
This Victorian killer lived about six million years ago at the same time as the famous massive shark Otodus megalodon, which also stalked Victoria’s ancient seas.
“This is really one of the few times in Earth’s history, in the last 66 million years, where you have multiple very large predatory, or ‘macro-predatory’ we call them, vertebrates in the ocean.
“Today, there are killer whales and there’s the white shark. However, they are comparative tiddlers.”
Erich treats me to an exclusive look at a recent discovery – an inner ear bone, or periotic, from a whale which lived five million years ago.
“Almost all other baleen whale fossils are from right whales, the cousins if you like of today’s blue whales, humpback whales. To be honest, pretty familiar,” he says. “This thing, though, is weird.”
Upon showing the fossil to a whale expert, Fitzgerald says he received the reply: “I can’t even assign that to a known family of whale.”
Recent history and the future
Back at the exhibition, Fitzgerald shows me a find which has palaeontologists scratching their heads.
“This is not necessarily number four in the ‘hits,’ but for my money, this is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of Victorian palaeontology.”
It’s a skull fossil from an Ice Age megafauna called Palorchestes.
“Victoria has produced the vast majority of fossils of this animal. This is one of the most bizarre mammals that’s ever existed on the planet.”
Palorchestes lived from about two million to 40,000 years ago. It grew to two metres long and weighed nearly a tonne.
“We have a reasonably good idea of what it looked like. It is this bizarre combination of a very high skull, tiny eyes placed very high on the head but forward facing. It has a long lower jaw, and what we think was probably a long giraffe- or anteater-like tongue. Its teeth seemed to be well-suited to crushing up fibrous plant matter. And yet it has the forelimbs and upper body of a world champion wrestler. On the ends of its fingers are claws that would give Freddy Krueger a run for his money.
“So it is an absolute mishmash of features that, taken together, give us an idea of what this thing looked like, but leave us utterly dumbfounded as to its lifestyle.”
Finding out more about the fossils found in Victoria, Fitzgerald says, will help place this part of Australia in the broader evolution of life on our planet.
“Obviously, as you know, there’s always a bit of a lag between the discovery in the field, work on the lab, and then publication of those finds,” he says. “I’m generally an optimist about these things, but I do think that we are in something of a golden age of Victorian palaeontology.
“The amount that we are going to be able to say in the decade, two decades to come, compared to when I was a bright-eyed, fossil-keen kid is at a level that I think will just inspire our children, both here and everywhere, and adults, frankly, to heights that we that we haven’t seen.”
Erich concludes: “At Museums Victoria, that’s our game.”
That, Kate says, is where she comes in.
“My role is as a science communicator working with a broad team of scientists, like Erich, and helping to gel the content together and to make it appropriate for a public audience. Because we have wonderful scientists, we have people who specialise in particular areas, but you need a team of people who bring all the other skills to actually create an exhibition.”
And exhibitions like “Victoria Evolves” help us do things that we never thought possible, like walking backwards and forwards through time and imagining what the world was like millions of years ago.