♦ — ♦ — ♦ — ♦ — ♦
“What exactly is ‘guano’?” I asked.
“Shit,” David replied.
He has such a poetic turn of phrase.
We were reading a placard in the Fossil Discovery Centre in Mt Isa about the work of palaeontologists at Riversleigh, about 250 kilometres to the northeast. Our original plan had been to do a mine tour in Mt Isa, but in the past week outback Queensland had become a crowded conduit for the displaced travellers in the far north of Australia. The mine tours were booked out for days on end.
Shallow as I am, I feel much the same way about mines as I do about dams, so I didn’t really care, but I was disappointed for David’s sake.
The Fossil Discovery Centre was our alternative tourist activity and I was discovering that it was by no means a second-rate consolation prize. Like all the best museums and exhibitions, it was carefully conceived, meticulously presented and genuinely captivating.
If there is one thing that reassures me that life has a purpose and that it is worth continuing to strive and exist, it is the loveable geekiness of scientists. They take up some obscure branch of knowledge that may never touch the lives of ordinary people and then pursue it with the kind of passion that convinces me, almost beyond doubt, that human nature has more than a grain of goodness and decency in it.
In fact, such scientists demonstrate that we live not just to produce excrement but also to perceive, to dream and to comprehend all mysteries.
This brings me back, however circuitously, to the guano question. Guano refers in this case to bat waste. Layers of bat excrement, along with the lime-rich rock in the Riversleigh area, had helped preserve the bones, jaws and skulls of frogs, birds and marsupials, along with the soft tissues of insects, snails and plants—almost from the moment that these living things died. The conditions at this particular site were simply ideal for the formation of fossils.
As a result of its dense fossil formations, Riversleigh has been recognised as a world heritage site and has lured palaeontologists from all over the world. These scientists can draw conclusions from the perfectly formed fossils in this region about the last thirty million years of animal evolution in Australia.
Who would ever have thought that bat excrement could contribute so significantly to human knowledge?
The exhibition was a creative masterpiece, with many eye-catching representations of long-extinct relatives of modern animals: the short-nosed kangaroo, the killer kangaroo, a koala that was half the size of the modern version but with a broader diet, the diprotodon (a giant wombat-like marsupial) and so on. Then there were the extinct animals with no modern relative, such as the marsupial lion and the giant birds, known in the vernacular as the “demon ducks of doom”. Finally, some fossils were too insubstantial for confident extrapolation of their characteristics. One was given the provisional name of “thingodonta”.
David and I wandered happily through the superb dioramas, one in the form of a cave, one a forest filled with prehistoric animals with placards to help us identify each one. There was even a little waterfall.
I wanted to say to David: “Isn’t this far better than a mine?”
But I didn’t want to seem heartless, so I asked him if I could take a photo of him emerging from the cave. My dear old fossil. It was the closest we were going to get to an underground experience. And best of all, there was no guano to be seen.
Final Notes
Accommodation
Discovery Park – Mt Isa (We had our own ensuite. It was pricy but heavenly.)
