‘Enormously exciting’ fossils found in NSW opal field suggest Australia had ‘age of monotremes’

Some time about 100m years ago in what is now an Australian opal field, a weird, furry, egg-laying, rabbit-sized mammal was gliding through a waterhole across a massive polar floodplain.but which scientists have thankfully blessed with the nickname “echidnapus” – was among the ancient descendants of one of the planet’s most unique orders of animals, the monotremes.

“It’s like discovering a whole new civilisation,” said Prof Tim Flannery, the lead author of the new research, published in The discovery of the opalised jawbones in an area known as Lightning Ridge almost never happened. Elizabeth Smith, of the Australian Opal Centre, and her daughter Clytie found the specimens about 25 years ago while going through the tailings heap of an opal mine.

“These specimens are a revelation,” she said. “It’s enormously exciting. They show the world that long before Australia became the land of pouched mammals, marsupials, this was a land of furry egg-layers – monotremes.” One curiosity of the modern platypus – an animal so odd that 18th-century British scientist George Shaw thought it a potential hoax – is how it lost its teeth .

Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)

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