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
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.
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.
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.
The numbat, Australia’s equivalent of a meerkat, is one of the unique mammal species confined to the south west.
Sean Van Alphen
New evidence shows marked similarities between two fossils – one from Brazil, the other South Africa. This confirms compelling geological findings that continents were once one giant land mass.