In Search of Ancient Queensland

By Dr Alex Cook and Dr Andrew Rozefelds

This book is a great reference for Queenslanders. It details the fossil record found in Queensland along with the geological events that shaped our continent and our State over the last 250 million years.

Rich in photographs, diagrams and maps, the book is a very captivating read for an ecologist. There is nothing else quite like it and must surely be the standard for geological interpretation of Queensland.

A potentially dry and dusty topic comes alive in this book with excellent artistic impressions of plants, animals and environments long gone. It contains 270 pages of top-class photography, held together with easily readable text. Every page has a new story, with many sirens calling – I had to stop myself from racing outside and digging in the dirt.

The Queensland Museum collection of fossils is obviously quite comprehensive and provides much of the material for this book. Some materials, especially dinosaur fossils, are held in museums in inland Queensland, especially as a result of recent dinosaur finds around Winton, Richmond and Eromanga. These finds have created great excitement in Queensland fossil circles.

I sometimes find fossils on Land for Wildlife properties and this adds a great deal of colour to our connectedness to the land. The ancient story is there to see, along with the modern story – and they are linked. I am lucky enough to have Triassic plant fossils on my own property – so I can feel the ancient story of life in the Clarence Moreton Basin, on the outer edge of Gondwana, somewhere down near the Antarctic Circle, well before the rise of the dinosaurs.

I thoroughly enjoyed In Search of Ancient Queensland. Get yourself a copy. Start digging.

Published by Queensland Museum, 2014
Paperback, colour photos, 280 pages
Price: $39.95
Available from select bookstores and the
Australian Age of Dinosaurs website.
Review by Keith McCosh

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