Cavers and scientists unearth near-complete short-nosed kangaroo fossil from East Gippsland cave

Joshua Van Dyke will happily abseil into a pitch black cave, or squeeze through crevices no one has ever gone intoAlthough that might sound terrifying, he's had plenty of experience.

The discovery highlights the role of non-scientists in finding and extracting fossils like this — particularly recreational cavers who dig out, abseil down, and crawl through caves in their spare time.The skeleton has 71 per cent of its bones, which makes it the most complete fossil skeleton ever discovered in a Victorian cave.

"We tried first to extract any collagen from the bones but we found it was quite old," said Vladimir Levchenko, a research scientist at ANSTO who dated the specimen. After about 20 hours of digging, the team exposed an entrance that allowed the group to abseil into the cave about 10 metres down, before belly crawling through a tight U-turn crevice into the cave.

"Carefully cleaning and exposing bones in place, documenting, collecting samples from sediment, and individually collecting, packing and removing each element from the cave," he said.working at the end of your reach into this tiny little crevice. It's a very uncomfortable place to be, particularly in your all-in-one caving suit and helmets and lights.It's not normally scientists or museum collection managers who shimmy through caves to find bones.

While cavers are some of the few groups who have the speciality knowledge to be able to get into these difficult environments, they're not doing it for the bones."explore and chart the extensive cave systems in Victoria".

Caving Paleontology Nightshade Cave Buchan Fossils

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