Word: archers
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...public. None of the others is marked, and their precise locations are kept secret to thwart looters and vandals. In all directions as far as the eye can see, Riversleigh is piles of stone, spinifex, scraggy trees and termite mounds. Apart from local Aborigines and the odd ranger, Archer's teams are the only people who set foot on this land. So how do they know their way around? Here, rogainer Creaser more than earns his keep. "This guy," says Frank Nissen, a surveyor with Queensland Parks and Wildlife, "has the best spatial brain of anyone I've ever...
...mellifluous tones that have captivated generations of science students, the Australian-born, Princeton-educated Archer, dean of science at the University of New South Wales, will speak for an hour, without a stumble or misplaced word, about the scope of discovery at World Heritage?listed Riversleigh and the strange beasts that used to live here. In 1983, Archer says, "in one rock, in five minutes, we found 35 new kinds of mammal. Not just species - like one kind of kangaroo versus another - but whole groups of things that are as unique as, say, whales are." Two years ago, Nissen...
...kangaroo, if not as a predator then as a scavenger. Extracting the fossils of such creatures is harder than finding them. These palaeontologists aren't eggheads: they spend seven hours each day under a scorching sun levering boulders and smashing them open with sledgehammers. On the first day, Archer notices the idiosyncratic hammering technique of honors student Kenny Travouillon, who's on his first trip to Riversleigh. "What you're doing's good, but try this," Archer suggests, sliding his dominant hand down the handle as the tool descends...
...Sometimes no amount of grunt is sufficient, bringing powder monkey Cannell (he prefers the term shot firer) to the fore. A Tasmanian miner who decided 20 years ago that the notion of cutting one's hair and beard was "bulls____," Cannell is a key player because early attempts by Archer's helpers at using explosives were a mixture of dangerous and comical. Once or twice, recalls Archer, in the minutes after a failed detonation, he crept toward the explosive "not 100% certain that it wasn't about to go off." Other times, they used too much of a too-powerful...
...nice sideshow, but Archer and others are focused these days on something bigger. Reflecting on nearly three decades of Riversleigh exploration, "We were at first knocked out," he says, "by the simple, stunning biodiversity that we were finding." But in using Riversleigh to track the evolution of local fauna over millions of years, Archer began to grasp its predictive power. Riversleigh, he says, has changed ideas about which creatures should be seen as endangered. Here, the news is good, bad . . . and dire. The koala, for example, appears safer than conservationists had imagined. Its population and habitat have shrunk...