It’s a detective story – a monumental mystery – that involves quite a few bizarre elements. There’s a cubic metre of chocolate; a giant, tree-climbing echidna; an ancient tiny creature snuffling around a dark forest near the South Pole; and a 3000-year-old Israelite called Samson. There’s hard slog, serendipity, and shovelfuls of sand. There are millennia of mystery, with palaeontological royalty undertaking guesswork and uncovering solid evidence over the past 25 years. And out of it all comes some of Australia’s most extraordinary mammals – the egg-laying platypus and echidna.
The gradual uncovering of the evolution of these monotremes has culminated in a paper released this year in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.
The research, headed by the Australian Museum’s chief scientist Kristofer Helgen and honorary associate Tim Flannery, has set out to explain how every significant monotreme fossil currently known fits into the evolutionary story, from a tiny shrew-like creature in Antarctica 130 million years ago to the present day.
We could start this ripping yarn almost anywhere over that period, but let’s close in on the 1960s, when budding American scientist Tom Rich is studying palaeontology at the University of California, Berkeley, and meets his future wife, fellow palaeontologist, Pat Vickers (now Vickers-Rich). Listening to their lecturer Professor Ruben Arthur Stirton, who had done pioneering palaeontological work in Australia in the 1950s and ’60s, helped stir their interest in things Australian, and would help Tom and Pat towards Australian citizenship and careers in which they’d uncover more of Australia’s ancient creatures of the dinosaur period than almost anyone else.
“If we’d stayed in North America, we would have been following in other people’s footsteps, but coming here, we were pioneers – that’s a real privilege,” says Rich, who is now curator of vertebrate palaeontology for Museums Victoria.
But the
