Australia’s Murray Cod

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31987, 14 May 1969, Page 10

Australia’s Murray Cod

Tail gtory-tellers of the Australian outback lean very heavily on the Murray cod for material.

The fish does exist It lives in fresh water and is good eating. It grows big with age and the record is about 2001 b. That is in a good river. In a good outback hotel bar it can grow much bigger, a creature of great age and sagacity which can elude many anglers until it meets the even greater cunning of whoever is telling the story. It would be good to be there if Fate ever confronts one of these story-tellers with Mr Vic Mills, of Bugaldie, a little township about 25 miles from Coonabarabran, northwest New South Wales. Mr Mills comes across many Murray cod. While they are not very big ones, he could easily trump the most outrageous claims concerning great age among the species.

Mr Mills's Murray cod are 20,000,000 years old. He finds them near a mountain top. These cod are embedded, fossilised, in a 12ft seam of chalk that runs through Chalk Mountain, two miles west of Bugaldie.

Geologists and palaeontologists are frequent viators. Chalk Mountain stands about 2000 ft above the surrounding plains. Above the chalk seam

it is capped with 100 ft of basalt It is a great place to consider geological time. That basalt came from some volcano that has long since vanished. The chalk seam, 1900 ft above the present plains, was once the bed of a freshwater lake.

Mr Mills mines the chalk. In the outside 100 ft all round the mountain it is white through ages of exposure to the elements. This white chalk is used in rubber manufacture and paint-bases and for filtration in a number of industries.

Within the mountain the chalk seam becomes almost black and much harder. It is used for fire-bricks.

“We’re always finding fossils in it,” said Mr Mills. “There are leaves, just like the present day gum (eucalypti leaves, and there are the Murray cod. They’re fairly small, for cod. The biggest we’ve found was 3ft long.” The fossilised fish are black or red in the chalk, and record great detail. Even the fine lines within the fins of the fish are distinct “In a couple of days we’d get 30 fossil fish, and they are only the ones we noticed,” he said. “We miss a lot more because we’re too busy mining the place.”—Australian News and Information Bureau.

The photograph shows Mr Mills with a fossilised Murray cod taken from his mine.