Canowindra Fish Fossils case

Listen to the audio guide of the Canowindra Fish Fossils case.

In 1955, a council road worker in Canowindra uncovered a rock slab bearing many extremely well preserved fossil fish. A local resident recognised the significance of this find and informed the Australian Museum. Since then, a further 4000 fossil fish specimens representing eight species have been discovered at the site. The Canowindra fossil fish fauna is Upper Devonian in age (about 370–360 million years old), and is dominated by two species of placoderms (armoured fishes): Bothriolepis yeungae and Remigolepis walker, with more than 1500 specimens of each species discovered to date. Other members of the Canowindra fish fauna include the relatively rarer placoderm Groenlandaspis and sarcopterygians (lobe-finned fishes). These fish were part of an ancient community that was trapped in a mass kill event.

AM Treasure Circle

Interested in supporting this treasure? Contact the Australian Museum Foundation to discover how.

Meiolania platyceps

Meiolania platyceps was a large-bodied terrestrial turtle about 2.5 metres long, with large horns and a bony, clubbed tail. Its horns prevented it from fully retracting its head into its shell like other turtles and tortoises. Meiolania platyceps lived on Lord Howe Island until its extinction in the late Pleistocene, about 100,000–120,000 years ago. The Australian Museum has the world’s largest collection of horned turtle fossils, including fossil skeletons, egg shells and nests. This fossil skull was inadvertently damaged during its excavation in 1980. Exposed bones identified as part of the shoulder of Meiolania were removed from a block of stone using a series of drill holes, but when the block itself was extracted, it turned out to contain a skull with a 2-centimetre drill hole in it.

AM Treasure Circle

Interested in supporting this treasure? Contact the Australian Museum Foundation to discover how.

Hickmania troglodytes

The Tasmanian Cave Spider is a major predator in cave systems. It weaves spectacular sheet webs that can be more than a metre in width. These webs often hang across the mouths of caves, or in hollow logs or the undersides of bridges. The spider hangs from its large web by its unusually long legs, waiting for prey to fall into its trap. The Tasmanian Cave Spider is important because it has some primitive features typical of the earliest spiders ever to evolve, including four abdominal lungs – called ‘book lungs’ – which appear as four light patches on the underside of the abdomen, alongside features characteristic of more modern spiders, such as jaws that open and close sideways. They grow to up to 2 centimetres long.

AM Treasure Circle

Interested in supporting this treasure? Contact the Australian Museum Foundation to discover how.

This two-circle reflecting goniometre was the most advanced tool of its type. Goniometers were first made in the sixteenth century, and used to precisely measure angles in the horizontal and vertical planes. In mineralogical and crystallopraphic studies, the instrument is used to precisely measure angles between often minute faces of crystals and to rotate those faces into view, greatly enhancing a scientist's ability to describe and identify minerals and make crystal drawings. This goniometer was used by Australian Museum scientist Charles Anderson - who later became the Museum's Director - to complete his PhD in morphological crystallography and the chemistry of Australian minerals. Goniometers were superseded by new technologies within a short time, but this particular instrument was still used by scientists at the Australian Museum until the late 1980s.

AM Treasure Circle

Interested in supporting this treasure? Contact the Australian Museum Foundation to discover how.

The Talbragar Fossil Bed, about 30 kilometres northeast of Gulgong, is the most significant Jurassic terrestrial fossil deposit in Australia. It is also the only known Jurassic fish site in New South Wales.

First discovered in 1889, the Talbragar site has produced hundreds of beautifully preserved plant and animal fossils. Fossils of more than 25 species have been found at Talbragar, including eight fish species, several insects and a spider. Sixteen plant species are also represented at this fossil site, including ferns and a conifer species similar to the Wollemi pine. The Talbragar fossils represent life in an ancient freshwater lake environment. The remains of animals and plants accumulated and were buried in the mud at the bottom of the lake. The fossil plants are typically white in colour and in striking contrast to the brown or yellow rock.

AM Treasure Circle

Interested in supporting this treasure? Contact the Australian Museum Foundation to discover how.

Pezoporus occidentalis

This specimen of a Night Parrot is one of only a very few that exist worldwide. Even before it was presumed to be extinct, the Night Parrot was known as Australia’s most enigmatic avian species, glimpsed only rarely by early explorers of arid Australia.

Night Parrot feathers were collected during the Horn Expedition of 1894, the first primarily scientific expedition to document the natural history of central Australia. There were no known sightings of the Night Parrot between 1912 and 1990, when a dead specimen was discovered in western Queensland by a group of scientists including Walter Boles, an ornithologist at the Australian Museum. Night Parrots were rediscovered in remote south-west Queensland in 2013, and Pullen Pullen Reserve was established by Bush Heritage, Australia, to assist their conservation. More birds were discovered on a neighbouring property in 2015 and another population was discovered in Diamantina National Park in 2016. In 2017, Night Parrots were also discovered in Western Australia, raising hopes for the persistence of this enigmatic species.

AM Treasure Circle

Treasure supported by Chris and Gina Grubb.

This beautiful, fragile crocoite specimen was discovered by Frank Mihajlowits at the Adelaide Mine – which originally produced lead and silver – in remote Western Tasmania, one of the finest sites for crocoite in the world. He in turn sold it in 1972 to Albert Chapman, an amateur collector, knowledgeable mineralogist and mineral trader who assembled an extensive private collection. The New South Wales Government purchased Chapman’s collection in 1988, with assistance from Conzinc Riotinto Australia, North Broken Hill and BHP. The collection was housed in the Geological and Mining (‘Earth Exchange’) Museum until its closure in 1995. Since that time it has been at the Australian Museum. Crocoite is a very rare mineral, because the elements that combine to form it – lead and chromium – are only found together when groundwater that has moved through chromium-rich rocks comes into contact with groundwater that has passed through a lead-rich ore body.

AM Treasure Circle

Treasure supported by Lily and Tina Gao and the New Business China Association.

Phyllopteryx taeniolatus

This vibrant and strange-looking marine creature, also known as a Weedy Seadragon, is one of only three seadragon species found in Australia. While all three species are found in the country’s temperate southern waters, only the Common Seadragon is found in the waters around Sydney. Seadragons are related to seahorses but, unlike seahorses, they do not have a pouch for rearing their young. Instead, male seadragons carry the eggs fixed to the underside of the tail. Their resemblance to the mythical dragon adds to their romantic allure. This specimen also represents the wonders of Sydney’s harbour – nearly 600 fish species have been recorded in its waters. This is more than twice that found in the UK’s coastal waters.

AM Treasure Circle

Interested in supporting this treasure? Contact the Australian Museum Foundation to discover how.

International scientific model makers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka were a father-and-son team from Dresden who crafted exquisite glass models of sea creatures.

In the 1870s and 80s, when these models were made, the rudimentary methods for preserving soft-bodied marine creatures were unable to prevent specimens from distorting and losing their vibrant colours. Instead, models made of wax and paper pulp as well as glass – sometimes created using illustrations from books as references – were used for display in museums across the world. The Blaschkas’ models were renowned for the spectacular, detailed finishes with which they captured the delicate structure and luminescence of living marine creatures. Their models are often tiny, exquisitely crafted and extraordinarily beautiful. Although of limited educational value today – many of them are anatomically incorrect or cannot be scientifically identified – the models’ worth resides in their provenance and artistry and the part they played in the history of exhibition and display in the Museum.

AM Treasure Circle

Interested in supporting this treasure? Contact the Australian Museum Foundation to discover how.

English naturalist and painter George French Angas emigrated to Australia in 1844. By 1852, he was living and working in Sydney, where he became Secretary of the Australian Museum from 1853 to 1860. He produced these 12 remarkable drawings of nudibranchs – soft-bodied, shell-less molluscs with extraordinary colours and numerous feathery gills – in 1852, from his observations of marine life in and around Sydney Harbour.

Angas had a keen eye, and managed to capture these creatures’ vibrant colours, often verging on fluorescent, as well as their changing patterns and strange, delicate and fascinating features. Long before colour photography, at a time when preservation techniques were crude, these drawings served as important records of these unique animals.

AM Treasure Circle

Interested in supporting this treasure? Contact the Australian Museum Foundation to discover how.

The exploratory voyage of the steamer Thetis, which trawled the waters from Jervis Bay to the Manning River in 1898, collecting samples of fish and invertebrates, was eagerly followed by the general public of the colony and was a great scientific success. The Australian Museum Curator of Fishes, Edgar Waite, collected over 1850 samples representing 450 species. Among these, six fish and over 100 invertebrates were previously unknown to science. A crab, a snail and a sponge were all named in honour of Waite’s achievement. Today, the Thetis collection continues to be studied by scientists, with new species being described as recently as 2005. The specimens offer a snapshot of the environment from more than 100 years ago, and the expedition marks an important development in the Museum’s collection.

AM Treasure Circle

Interested in supporting this treasure? Contact the Australian Museum Foundation to discover how.