Discovering fossils in Naracoorte Caves

Hello from Naracoorte, our last stop in South Australia. We are staying in the local showgrounds which have room set aside for caravans with power and hot showers – really that’s all we need. Now it is getting colder we really do want to have access to power as we have the heater running most of the time we’re in the van. Being able to charge the laptops and boil a kettle makes having power wonderful too!

Yesterday we took a bike ride into town and discovered the displays at the Visitor’s Centre. They have a lot of sheep based history here, and included a huge display of shearing technology since the 1800s when the area was first settled. With Trevor and my families both having farming backgrounds this was particularly interesting. These photos show Harry and me ‘using’ hand shears from the late 19th Century that are powered by human-muscle.

Shearing has certainly come a long way since then, and the display included a robotic shearing system that showed the automatic shearing and husbandry of sheep, classing and baling of fleece.

There was also an old school room on display and this photo shows Harry trying his hand at writing in ink. He decided that using a pencil or pen was much easier than using a nib!

 

 

 

 

 

Today we visited the Naracoorte Caves and went on a fossil tour. Surprisingly I wasn’t asked to donate Trevor to the exhibit. The cave and the fossil centre was brilliant and we learnt a lot about the megafauna that existed on our continent 50 to 500000 years ago. I already knew of creatures such as the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) that didn’t become extinct until 1936, but I didn’t know anything about the diprotodon (giant wombat). Even though he was a herbivore he was simply enormous. Here is Trevor trying to feed Max to the diprotodon model at the front of the caves visitors centre. In the centre itself they had another model who seemed even bigger!

 

 

The fossil display was magnificent – here is a photo of a notebook that has been hardened and is a much more interesting way of displaying information than on a plain sheet of paper.

 

We took a tour with about 20 other people to the fossil caves. Back in the 1960s  cavers came upon a fossil bed that has bones in it that are over 500 000 years old. The ground is limestone, and pit traps formed where the slightly acidic rainwater wore holes in the limestone. The limestone slowly crumbled away leaving holes around 20m deep which unsuspecting animals could easily fall into. Many different animal bones have fossilised and been discovered in the cave which is now World Heritage listed. Bones found include plant eating kangaroos, snakes, birds, carnivorous marsupials, possums ….

 

We also saw some familiar cave formations – stalactites, stalagmites, shawls, straws, rashers of bacon… Our family is a bit spoilt by having access to the beautiful caves in South West WA, but the Naracoorte caves also had some stunning displays. Unfortunately my photography can never capture the incredible beauty of the formations but still give an idea of what we saw….