A selection of the Museum's extensive palaeontological collection has been made available to the public at the Fossils: evolution of life activity station. Handle real and extremely old fossils, look into the fossilised eyes of a 420-million-year-old trilobite, compare a dinosaur toe bone to your own and imagine what kind of bite the 12 m long shark, Carcharocles megalodon, would have had.
This activity station also includes some well-preserved fossil specimens from the Sydney Basin that enable scientists to reconstruct what this area looked like before the time of the dinosaurs.
This activity station can be found in search & discover, Level 2.
Glossopteris leaf fossils
Helen Clark
"I find fossils exciting - they are a key to the past and glossopteris has a direct connection to our local area. The name comes from two Greek words 'glosso' meaning 'tongue', which describes the shape, and 'pteris', meaning 'fern'."
Fish fossil Cleithrolepis granulata
Wendy Macalister
"The fossil is from the local area (Hornsby) and is 230 million years old, a similar age to the oldest dinosaurs. This specimen demonstrates the excitement of a geologist finding a perfect specimen in plain rock. It can be used for all levels of understanding- from surprising very small children with an unexpected treasure, to talking at length about fossil formation and geological time scales."
Dinosaur eggs
Les Bassett
"These eggs help show the growth and development of the huge sauropods that evolved during the Mesozoic era. Their life must have totally consisted of eating to develop into the size they did."
Gastroliths
Angela Thomas
"I love showing these to visitors and describing their purpose. The most wonderful thing about them is that they are the actual objects that were inside a dinosaur millions of years ago, as opposed to the fossils which have been transformed into stone- this blows visitor's minds!"
Copyright © Australian Museum, 2003
