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Australia's inland sea: the age of dinosaurs


At the South Australian Museum is the permanent exhibit called The Opal Fossils of South Australia: Life of Australia’s inland sea during the Age of Dinosaurs.

Where there is now a stark, hot, inhospitable desert in the centre of Australia there was once an inland sea. The Opal Fossils Gallery has specimens of opalised fossils from Coober Pedy and Andamooka in the north of South Australia in this inland sea, far from the coasts of today.

The ice-cold, salty inland sea of the past once held giant marine reptiles, dinosaurs, and shell creatures. On display is the opalised skeleton of a six-metre-long Addyman Plesiosaur. It was found in an opal mine in Andamooka in 1968 and is considered one of the best-preserved dinosaur skeletons on Earth.

Plesiosaurs were large marine dinosaur reptiles with limbs like flippers, extremely long necks, and small heads – much like the one that Scotland’s “Nessie” monster in Loch Ness is said to resemble. These dinosaurs are slow-moving, toothless reptiles that once lived in the Eromanga Sea.

Other exhibits include a piece of ancient seabed with several hundred opalised shells of Australia’s inland sea, fossils from the Moon Plain, north of Coober Pedy, and the largest ammonite ever found in Australia. It was originally mistaken for a truck tyre.

Australia’s inland sea, also known as an epeiric sea, was a shallow sea, of less than 250 metres deep, covering central areas of the continent. Many early Australian explorers travelled inland to find the “sea” during the 1820s and 30s, especially Charles Sturt. They never found it. British explorer Captain Charles Napier Sturt (1795-1869) led several expeditions inland, starting either from Sydney or Adelaide.

According to the National Geographic, Australia could once again have an inland sea – minus dinosaurs. If the world’s ice caps and glaciers melt, lifting sea levels above 70 metres, in about 5,000 years into the future, an inland sea could occur. Scientists writing in the National Geographic said that the sea level has been rising at the rate of about three millimetres a year globally. And at that rate, where there are now fossilised shells, there could be the abundance of sea life.


www.samuseum.sa.gov.au








MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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