South Australian Museum - North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia 5000

Professor Peter Sutton FASSA 

Anthropologist, South Australian Museum

Senior Research Fellow, School of Earth & Environmental Sciences, University of Adelaide

Presented in collaboration with the Anthropological Society of South Australia. 

Abstract

In 2006 an old rusting trunk of written materials and photographs had been handed in by a member of the public.

Museum Anthropologist Dr Philip Clarke thought it contained old records from fellow colleague Peter Sutton's primary anthropological and linguistic field location. He was right. 

The information inside the trunk about Aurukun in western Cape York Peninsula, Queensland.

This 'treasure chest' was the long lost tin trunk of pioneer Australian anthropologist Ursula Hope McConnel (1888-1957), lost no longer. 

This talk will explore the significance of McConnel's life and work and the new light shed upon both by the trunk's contents.

This event has now ended. 

Professor Guy Narbonne

Research Chair, Queen's Univesity, Kingston, Canada

This Sprigg Lecture is part of Fossil Fest.

Abstract

Although microbial fossils extend three and a half billion years backward into the Archean, large recognisable fossils did not appear until just before the Cambrian explosion of life, a fact noted even by Charles Darwin in writing The Origin of Species.

The oldest large and morphologically complex fossils in the world are the Mistaken Point assemblage of Newfoundland in eastern Canada (580-560 million years old).  Mistaken Point fossils abruptly appeared coincident with a major rise in atmospheric oxygen and the meltdown of the last of the Proterozoic "snowball" glaciers.

The Mistaken Point fossils represent soft-bodied creatures living on a deep-sea bottom that were killed when they were catastrophically covered by eruptions of volcanic ash, exquisitely preserving them as fossils and forming "census populations" that can be studied using modern techniques in ecology. Most of these fossils are "rangeomorphs", an extinct experiment in fractal life that dominated early stages of animal evolution.

Younger Ediacaran assemblages in Russia, Australia, and Namibia show increasing soft-bodied complexity, including the appearance of bilaterian animals. The Ediacara biota disappeared abruptly 540 million years ago, most likely due to competition and predation from the evolving animals of the Cambrian explosion.

This event has now ended. 

Professor Steve Donnellan

Head of Evolutionary Biology Unit

South Australian Museum

Abstract: 

Professor Steve Donnellan will highlight exciting discoveries made from the Australian Biological Tissue Collection (ABTC) and how advanced DNA technologies are set to "liberate the genomes" of long-dead animals held in the Museum since in the 1860s.

The South Australian Museum is custodian to the ABTC – the largest in the Southern Hemisphere – with nearly 130,000 tissue samples of animals, fish, birds and plants kept in giant freezers in the Museum's basement.

The miniscule tissues at the South Australian Museum are literally scientific treasures. The collection is priceless because of the effort it takes to gather the samples and because many of the samples are now irreplaceable. Many of the tissues are from species or populations which are now extinct, such as the Southern Gastric Brooding Frogs from southern Queensland, and the Long-eared Mouse from South Australia.

DNA analysis of these samples has helped convict criminals in Australian court cases, identify illegal imports, helped scientists across the globe study biodiversity and allowed local researchers to discover and identify new species.