Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

Jurassic non-Marine Fish

The only fish known from the Jurassic of Australia are all non-marine. The Walloon Group near Ipswich and the Hutton Sandstone near Monto  southeastern Queensland have produced fragmentary fish material that is mostly indeterminate actinopterygians, apart from a body section that was found at Monto. This specimen has impressions of thick rhombic scales resembling those of semionotiforms, primitive ray-finned fish that were distributed widely during the Jurassic. The Talbragar Beds contain a well-preserved fish fauna from the Late Jurassic. A very large number of complete skeletons  from a variety of endemic Gondwanan taxa have been recovered from these deposits. Included among these are archaeomenids, a family that is known only from Australia such as Archaeomene tenuis and Madariscus robustus, and Uarbryichthys latus, a macrosemiiform. This deposit has also produced Coccolepis australis, a species of the genus Coccolepis of the  globally distributed palaeoniscoid family, and the oldest known teleost fish from Australia, Cavenderichthys talbragarensis. There are also species with uncertain relationships such as an unidentified coelacanth, (Crossopterygii), amiiform (primitive actinopterygians, bowfins that are extant, and hybodontiform sharks as well as Aphnelepis australis, an enigmatic archaeomenid.

Sources & Further reading

1. Kear, B.P. & Hamilton-Bruce, R.J., 2011, Dinosaurs in Australia, Mesozoic life from the southern continent, CSIRO Publishing.