RARE FOSSIL SHELLS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 276, 20 October 1938, Page 9

RARE FOSSIL SHELLS

(From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, Oct. 15. Fossil shells discovered some time ago, in the southern part of the Kimberley districts, in the far north of Western Australia, have been found by Dr. C. Teichert, research palaeontologist at the University of Western Australia, to be the only fossils of their kind yet recorded outside Europe or America. Speaking on “Devonian Nautoloid Cephalopods” at a meeting of the Royal Society of Western Australia, Dr. Teichert said that geological studies showed that the distribution of the land and sea had been subject to frequent changes in the past, and large tracts of Australia were at different periods covered by sea. The nautoloid group of fossil animals lived in the sea of the Devonian period, about' three hundred million years ago. Until he recognised the specimens in the University fossil collection and in the fossil collection at Canberra they had not been recorded outside Europe or America.