Antarctic Fossils 360m Years Old

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31987, 14 May 1969, Page 20

Antarctic Fossils 360m Years Old

Fossil remains of a fish forerunner of the first amphibians, about 360 million years old, and another link between Antarctica and the ancient continent of Gondwanaland have been discovered by the Victoria University Antarctic Expedition.

The members of the teem which made the discoveries last summer in Victoria Land were Drs P. N. Webb and B. C. McKelvey and Messrs M. Gorton and B. Kohn. The perfect fossil jawbone of the Crossopterygian fish was found high in the Boomerang Range, above the Skelton Glacier, and the other discovery, an extremely ancient glacial moraine, was made in the Mount Fleming area of the Wright Dry Valley system. Both areas are about 150 miles west of Soott Base and McMurdo Sound. The ancient fish was of an extremely high order of fish, the next step below the amphibian creatures which had been the first to walk on land. Among the sandstone sections of shell and animal remnants brought out from the area were “appendages" of hard bone.

“We are not quite sure what they are, but we believe

they were hard fins which these creatures used as feet,” said Mr Gorton.

The jawbone had taken two hours of uncovering in a freezing wind, and had been photographed with Dr Webb, said Mr Gorton. The fish was of the same period as the Coelacanth, and related types had been discovered elsewhere. In Warm Sea

"It was too fragile to move. The big teeth were loose in the sockets, and we left it where it was for someone better equipped to handle,” he said. “From the photograph alone, specialist scientists can identify the fish, which as far as we are aware, has never been found before.”

The fish was thought to have lived in a great, warm, freshwater sea. As the sea slowly dried up, and the waters receded, these creatures had to evolve means of coping with the drier conditions, Mr Gorton said. The result was the first amphibians of the Devonian Age. These had developed into the first land animals, and bad been followed by the reptiles, from one section of which man had finally evolved from warmblooded mammalian links. Mr Gorton said the finds of the extremely ancient glacial moraine deposits and sedl-

ments linking this Victoria Land section of Antarctica with the ancient single continent, Gondwanaland, was the most exciting of their several discoveries. About 50 geologists had previously worked the Mount Fleming area. None had come across the remains of the Tillite moraines in the ancient rock strata. The Tillite ancient moraine, now rocks, had been found

in identical formation in South Africa, India, Australia and South America. It had also been found much farther south in the Antarctic continent, in the region of the Beardmore Glacier. “This find definitely links Victoria Land with the southern mountains of the Antarctic Continent,” said Mr Gorton. “This has been theorised previously, but there

has been no proof.” It meant that Victoria Land, with the Beardmore area, had once been part of the course of the ancient glacier which about 300,000,006 years ago bad flowed across regions of what were now South Africa, India, Australia and South America. Similar finds had been made in all these countries.