Sandie Peters/Unsplash
Today, these plants are iconic to the Australian bush. But banksias and their many relatives originated in far-away shores 130 million years ago.
An Opalton grasswren.
Barry Baker
Our birds are tough. They went through some mean climatic conditions to make Australia home.
The frill-necked lizard is one of many land animals that reached Australia from Southeast Asia.
Damien Esquerré
There’s no single reason many Asian animals spread to Australia but few went the other way – but climate, geography and the slow drift of tectonic plates all played a role.
The African elephant is the world’s largest terrestrial mammal.
Ara Monadjem
Africa’s mammals are a global treasure that must be protected.
A fossilised insect wing with some of its colouration preserved is just one tiny treasure emerging from the site.
Rose Prevec
Tiny plant and insect fossils provide unique insight into an ancient ecosystem that would, later, be altered by climatic shifts.
Shutterstock
Lillipillies are one of Australia’s great gifts to the natural world. But the story of these homegrown heroes may be taking a grim turn.
Huon pine in Tasmania.
Shutterstock
Some of these trees can be over 30 metres high. Others, can live for centuries or, for the Huon pine, up to an astonishing ten millennia.
An analysis of the skull suggests the ankylosaur may have had a poorer sense of smell than its counterparts in the northern hemisphere.
Zhang Kaiyv/Unsplash
Maidenhair trees, Ginkgo biloba, can live for over 1,000 years and grow 35m tall. While they’re beautiful to look at, they’re also notorious for their vomit-smelling seeds.
Dragon springtails (pictured) are widely distributed in forests of eastern Australia — yet they’re still largely unknown to science.
Nick Porch
Australia’s invertebrates have an ancient lineage and a fascinating evolution. Get up close with macrophotography to discover tiny, unique animals you’ve probably never seen before.
John Tann/Flickr
The plant takes its name from the colonial botanist Joseph Banks, but the coastal banksia’s history goes way back to ancient times.
Scott Hartman (skeletaldrawing@gmail.com)
This ancient cat-sized animal lived millions of years ago and had features not found in any of today’s mammals.
Reconstruction of the ancient environment at the Highlands trace fossil site about 183 million years ago.
Artwork by Akhil Rampersadh. Heterodontosaurid silhouette is courtesy of Viktor Radermacher.
These trackways offer rare insights about ancient life in a stressful, hostile environment during the Early Jurassic.
Klipbokberg, Grootrivierhoogte, in the Cederberg. These mountains contain clues about ancient landscapes.
Cameron Penn-Clarke
A record of sea-level change from 400 million years ago in South Africa, reveals how ecosystems and environments collapsed at the South Pole.
The beaches of Koh Phangan are set within rocky crags made of granites, the type of rocks studied to piece Thailand to Australia.
Romana Dew
Australia’s slowly heading north to one day become part of Asia, but a study of the rocks tell us that’s not the first time there’s been a connection.
Reconstruction of a Permian swamp.
Rose Prevec
Plants, in their fossil forms, can reveal a great deal about past environments and climates.
The Spinosaurus was just one example of a dinosaur that roamed Africa hundreds of millions of years ago.
By Mike Bowler from Canada (Spinosaurus) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
You might recognise Spinosaurus, from Jurassic Park 3, but did you realise it is 100% an African dinosaur?
Mauritius beachfront view with volcanic mountains. The basaltic lavas constituting these mountains formed no older than 9 million years ago.
Prof. Susan J. Webb, University of the Witwatersrand
Researchers have found a small piece of a “lost continent” buried underneath the lava on Mauritius.
Marcoo was a 1.4 kilotonne ground-level nuclear test carried out at Maralinga in 1956. The contaminated debris was buried at this site in the 1967 clean-up known as Operation Brumby.
Author provided
History is writ large in the remote areas around Woomera and the Nullarbor: from the fossils of microscopic, cell-like creatures to ancient stone tools to the deitrus of rocket tests and the painful legacy of the Maralinga atomic blasts.
Savannasaurus was pretty small, by titanosaur standards.
Travis Tischler/Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History
Dinosaur bones unearthed at one of Australia’s richest fossil sites have introduced us to a new species: Savannasaurus, one of a family of huge dinosaurs that trekked here more than 100 million years ago.