Rising from South Australia's outback plains, the Ikara-Flinders Ranges have long been loved as a destination, but a new World Heritage bid seeks to also recognise the ancient landforms as an extraordinary window into the evolution of animal life.
Key evidence for the bid is documented within scientific papers produced over 15 years by UNE geoscientists like Professor John Paterson and Dr Marissa Betts.
They have contributed to research that reveals the region's gorges and escarpments as windows into evolution spanning a critical 350-million-year interval. The rocks preserve evidence of ‘Snowball Earth’ (a time when Earth was so cold that glaciers may have been present in the tropics), entomb fossils of enigmatic soft-bodied organisms, and carry a detailed record of the ‘explosion’ of complex life forms that led to the rise of modern animals.
The South Australian Government submitted documentation for Tentative Listing to UNESCO in April, largely based on the region’s extraordinary record of the emergence of animal life on Earth. In May, the Commonwealth Government endorsed the nomination and UNESCO officially placed the Ikara-Flinders Ranges on the Tentative List for World Heritage.
“A great deal of the story about the origins and early evolution of animals is preserved in the Flinders Ranges,” Prof. Paterson said. "The rock exposures are really extensive and teeming with fossils. It's like walking across the pages of a history book: the odd page has been ripped out, but to see prehistory laid out in so much detail is spectacular."
“Achieving World Heritage status for the Flinders would put Australia on the world stage for palaeontological heritage, and promote geotourism in the region. It would be a way of telling the world about the awesome rocks and fossils on this continent.”
Crucial to the bid is Dr Betts’s doctoral research, which involved documenting the millions of years of folded and fossiliferous rock layers into a temporal timeline that embeds the Flinders Ranges strata into a global timescale.
Dr Betts, co-founder of UNE's LithoLab, is a geologist and palaeontologist. By identifying fossils and noting their exact positions in rock layers, she has been able to much more accurately date the Cambrian strata of the Flinders Ranges.
Until Dr Betts’s work, the global reference for much of the period covered by Flinders Ranges geology was in Siberia. South Australian rocks provide a more complete picture, Dr Betts said — and are far more accessible.
"In the Flinders, you can very easily walk up to formations that capture millions of years of geological and biological evolution. If you wanted to see similar Cambrian exposures elsewhere in the world, you would have to visit some very remote areas — and in some cases, be helicoptered in."
Dr Betts drew partly on the work of Prof. Paterson, who has been documenting the Ranges' deep palaeontological record since visiting there during his own PhD research in 2002.
Prof. Paterson, Dr Betts and their colleagues have logged kilometres of strata, and described and named dozens of new fossil species from the Cambrian rocks of the Ranges. In some cases, these represent the best-known examples of these early animals. Their Honours student, Stephanie Richter-Stretton is tackling a project that continues this work.
Both Prof. Paterson and Dr Betts also acknowledge the pioneering work of their mentor, Macquarie University palaeontologist Professor Glenn Brock, whose decades-long work documenting the fossil diversity of the Flinders Ranges has been central to the recognition of the region’s importance.
The Flinders Ranges geological successions represent an extraordinary window into the major stage in Earth’s history described as the “dawn of animal life”. The sites in this serial property present a geological record of Earth’s wildly fluctuating climate conditions and environments over a period of 350 million years that evidences the special habitable conditions on Earth that gave rise to animal life. This succession captures this dynamic record that includes life from microbial stromatolites to early primitive multicellular life, to the advent of animals as exemplified by the remarkable Ediacara Biota. The evolution of skeletons, limbs, eyes, predation and vertical burrowing during the Cambrian radiation was the origin of many modern animal life forms on Earth today.
