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Pleistocene
Megafauna
August 2008 saw the publication of a paper in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences (US) presenting evidence
to support the contention that humans played a key role in the extinction
of the Pleistocene megafauna in Tasmania. QVMAG Research Officer
Craig Reid was a contributing author to this publication.
QVMAG’s palaeontology collection was the catalyst for the
work which culminated in this paper, involving researchers on the
mainland and as far afield internationally as Queen’s University
in Belfast, University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and Oxford University
in England.
The
interest of principal authors, Dr Chris Turney and Prof. Tim Flannery,
was drawn when they became aware of QVMAG’s holdings of bones
from two quite different cave sites in north-west Tasmania—one
near Mt Cripps and one at Scotchtown.
From our work on this material, they realised that these assemblages
of bones were as notable for the different species groups (mainly
mammals) that they represented as they were for some of the individual
specimens.The Mt Cripps assemblage, acquired in 2000 from a chamber
called ‘Bone Aven’, represented mammal species that
survive to this day with one exception: Protemnodon, a large extinct
browsing kangaroo (perhaps most easily visualised as a modern pademelon
wallaby—about two metres tall!). The prize specimen from Mt
Cripps which spawned our initial interest in the site is the almost
complete skull of Protemnodon.
By contrast, the Scotchtown bone assemblage was salvaged from a
quarry site in 1942 and is quite fragmentary, but it represents
all seven megafaunal species known from Tasmania, in addition to
a range of mammals still surviving today. Dating of specimens from
the two sites relied upon two techniques. Radiocarbon dating was
applied to samples of bone, and Optically Stimulated Luminescence
(OSL) was applied to mineral samples associated with bones from
both sites. The Scotchtown mineral sample came from a clod of soil
with bone fragments that had been left undisturbed since being collected
in 1942, over 60 years ago. The Mt Cripps mineral sample was obtained
from the impacted silt inside the nasal cavity of the Protemnodon
skull. This has been an exciting project to be involved with. It
illustrates the significance of well-documented collections to scientific
research and the importance of minimising the extent of interference
to preserve specimens so that they maintain scientific value as
new techniques develop.
Gastropods
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In June
2008 the latest issue of the Records of the Queen Victoria
Museum was published. Titled 'Upper Ordovician Gastropods
from the Gordon Group, Western Tasmania', the paper was
written by Chris Tassell, former Director and now Honorary
Research Associate in Geology.
In this paper twenty-six species of gastropods are described
from the Ordovician Gordon Limestone Group, in western Tasmania.
Twenty-two are described from the Zeehan area and nine of
these are new species and include Raphistoma montanum,
Liospira regina, Paraliospira insula,
Lophospira corona, L. florencsis, L. argenta,
Donaldiella brittania, Brachytomaria victoria,
Threavia maxima. As well, a number of gastropods are
recorded from other occurrences of limestones in western
Tasmania including those at Queenstown, Bubs Hill and the
Huskisson River from which the new species Tropidodiscus
huskissoni is described
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