ARTICLES
A Mop with Tentacles; the Nilpena Fossil Area
By Dr Arthur White
Tribute to a Farmer Fossil Finder
ancient sea floor. Many of the fossils known from Ediacara were
also present at Nilpena.
Ross Fargher owns a remote sheep station in the northern Flinders
Ranges in South Australia called Nilpena (Figure 1). The station
is only 20 kilometres from the famous Ediacara Hills, where 550
million year old fossils have been found. The Ediacara fossils
were first found by renowned Australian geologist Reg Sprigg in
1946 (see below). The fossils were so important and illuminating
about early multi-cellular life that this part of geological time is
now known as the Ediacaran Period.
These fossils and the property featured on the David Attenborough
program ‘First Life’ that was filmed in 2009.
The Ancient Ediacaran World
Between 570 and 540 million years ago (long before dinosaurs
roamed the Earth) the warm seas were inhabited by strange soft
bodied organisms. Some resembled jellyfish while others looked
like nothing alive today. Some of these organisms became
trapped in fine silt in tidal flats and were fossilised when the silt
turned to stone. As sea levels changed, the sea floor was uplifted
and become part of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.
Some of the better known Ediacaran animals are Dickinsonia:
Image ABC (Figure 2) and Spriggina Image ABC (Figure 3).
In 1946, while exploring for minerals, geologist Reg Sprigg
discovered fossil imprints in rocks around the low hills of
the western Flinders Ranges at the old Ediacara mine field.
Sprigg’s discovery was extremely important as it was the first
time the fossilised remains of an entire community of soft-bodied
creatures had been found in such abundance anywhere in the
world. Sprigg’s discovery was so significant that fossils were
named after him. The fossils preserved in the ancient sea floor at
Ediacara record the first known multicellular animal life on Earth
that predates the Cambrian.
Figure 1: Nilpena lies in the northern Flinders Ranges in South
Australia.
On the side of a hill, not far from the shearer's quarters, Ross
Fargher found more fossils in the mid-1980s. They proved to
be from the same period as those in the Ediacara Hills. Like the
fossils at Ediacara, the fossils were imprints left behind in the
26
SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL NEWS VOL 67 NO 4