Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

The history of Australia starts at the beginning of the history of the Earth. The earliest known blocks of crust on Earth are the seeds around which the Australian continent grew. The Earth is believed to have formed about 4550 million years ago, and only a short time later the dated rocks of the beginnings of Australia solidified. By travelling around Australia one can visit many stages of the development of life and the geologically historic events in the history of the Earth, such as:  

•  Living reptiles whose much bigger, but otherwise almost identical, ancestors probably feasted on dinosaurs, 

• the first known multicellular organisms that were solid enough to leave fossils,

• stand on the site of the biggest known dinosaur stampede, 

• see in the mud, now fossilised, where the first vertebrates to emerge from the sea left tracks as they foraged above the tide,

• See the tracks left by the first known animals to walk about on dry land, eurypterids, millions of years before the vertebrates existed,

• Even further back one can stand on a range of hills that formed when Antarctica and Australia collided to form a bond that would last a billion years, and gaze about 30 km to another line of hills that formed during the crustal movements that separated the two continents for the last time 45 million years ago,

• see 3500 million year old stromatolites, taller than their modern descendants in Shark Bay, but otherwise unchanged. When they were alive they contributed to the growing oxygen levels, at first in the ocean, then in the atmosphere, that allowed later life forms to evolve,

• In the Hamersley Ranges can be seen the results of the rusting of the iron of the oceans by the oxygen to eventually form the ironstone of the range,

• see the hills of recycled sandstone in which were found the zircon crystals that were part of the oldest rocks ever dated, 4404 +/- 8 million years, the beginning of time as far as the Earth is concerned. 

• Visit Australia's answer to the Burgess Shale - Emu Bay Early Cambrian fossil beds on Kangaroo Island

• Unusual for a continent to have 75 % of it flora made up of 2 genera, Eucalyptus, where rainfall exceeds 300 mm /yr and Acacia where rainfall is less than 300 mm/yr.

Australia Zoo         Photo Gallery

One possible starting point, where Australian saltwater crocodiles, survivors from the age of dinosaurs can be seen in "power mode" is Australia Zoo, the home of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.

• Precambrian
• Cambrian
• Ordovician
• Silurian
• Devonian
• Carboniferous
• Permian
• Triassic
• Jurassic
• Cretaceous
• Palaeocene
• Eocene
• Oligocene
• Miocene
• Pliocene
• Pleistocene

Sources & Further reading

Links

Australia Through Time