WORLD’S RAREST ANIMAL

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21886, 12 September 1936, Page 15

WORLD’S RAREST ANIMAL

KANGAROO PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT EXTINCT SEARCH BY EXPEDITION FROM SYDNEY (mOM CUE OWN COBBBSPOKDEXT.) ' SYDNEY, August 5. A party including two members of the Australian Museum staff, Sydney, has left here for central, northwest, and north Australia to search for Ihe world’s rarest animal, the broad-nosed rat kangaroo. This animal was thought to be extinct until 1931, when a South Australian mammalogist obtained several live specimens in the “gibber” country of central Australia. Outside of the British Museum, which obtained four specimens in 1843, only the South Australian Museum, Adelaide, has a collection of specimens of this animal. The party, which consists of Messrs H. Fletcher, palaeontologist, W. Barnes, taxidermist, and L. Fletcher, of Alice Springs, will travel about 5000 miles in two or three months. It will go in a utility truck via Melbourne, Adelaide, Port Augusta, and Alice Springs to Tennant Creek, Derby, Wyndham, and Darwin, and back through northwestern Queensland to Brisbane and Sydney. Messrs Fletcher and Barnes will collect Ordovician fossils in the McDonnell Ranges and the East Kimberleys, and Cambrian fossils in known deposits in the Northern Territory and north-west Queensland. The Ordovician fossils are said to be at least 600,000,000 years old, and the Cambrian fossils 750,000,000- years old. These deposits are the oldest in Australia.