STRANGE FOSSILS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20607, 4 July 1930, Page 10

STRANGE FOSSILS.

3,000,000 YEARS OLD. DISCOVERY IN AUSTRALIA. [from oub own* correspondent. ] MELBOURNE, June 12. Relics of sea, creatures that lived millions of years ago were recently founa in the Mount Gambier district, South Australia, by the palaeontologist of the National Museum in Melbourne, and they are now on view at the Fossil Galleries there. The fruits of the expedition are regarded as of much scientific value, and they are certainly of popular interest. The specimens include several which are finer than any of the . kind previously discovered.

Mr. R. A. Keble, who was mainly responsible for the discoveries, worked over an ancient sea-bed where the Rev. Julian Tenison-Wood many vears ago found isolated plates of a starfish in coralline limestone. The fragments suggested a starfish of large size, and for seventy years fossil hunters have been going to the territory hoping to find complete specimens. Mr. Keble obtained an arm and portion of the central disc of this famous starfish which flourished between 2.500,000 and 3.000.000 years ago. It proved to be a species of Pentagonaster, as its discoverer surmised.

This remarkable creature measured llin. across the arms and disc. It must havo been of the common genera of the Miocene Sea. Though so ancient, it is an infant compared with some fossil starfish that have been obtained from the Silurian beds near Melbourne, uhich are now the subject of research by Mr. Keble.

The coralline limestone in which th« Mount Gambier starfish was found is composed almost entirely of minut<» polyzoa. loosely cemented into a caJcareoug aggregate. One very fire slab represents the sea-bed as it was many years ago. One sees nothing bat marina organisms, even when examining- the slab through a magnifying glass. In the same ancient bed are the vertebrae of whales and sharks' teeth.