Word: creaser
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...first morning in the field and Creaser, a geologist, kneels in the red dirt of Queensland's Gulf country, 200 km northwest of Mount Isa. His right hand clutches a crack hammer, which is poised over a piece of rock the size of two bricks. What's inside the rock will make Creaser's day and remind the rest of the party that, for all the wonders this place has yielded, it has much more to give. "Work at Riversleigh," says team leader Mike Archer, "will go on forever...
...Creaser is entitled to feel hopeful as he takes aim. As fossil deposits go, Riversleigh is like a golf course where you can't help but shoot sub-par. Bones abound: even the untrained eye can spot them protruding from the gray limestone outcrops. In an area of 40 sq. km, Archer's teams have found and named hundreds of sites since 1976, when he and palaeontologist Henk Godthelp decided to check out reports that Riversleigh - then a cattle station, now part of Lawn Hill National Park - might contain valuable fossils. And it did - in the same way that...
...single strike breaks the rock in two, revealing a mass of bone in each piece. Creaser gazes at what he recognizes to be the jaws of a largish animal, one that perished some 24 million years ago. But what kind of animal? The others gather around, including Archer, who's one of Australia's best at classifying - all but instantly - what would look to most people like generic bone. "The finest specimen of a marsupial lion jaw that's ever been found," he declares. It seems to have belonged, he explains later, to a previously unknown, intermediate species of this...
...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 met. More than 250 sites and he can lead you to every one of them." Digging will be confined this year to Riversleigh's fringes, for money's tight...
...scientists. "And we expect," says Archer, "that given the nature of the geology of this region, there's no reason that deposits of as rich a kind as we're discovering now won't be found representing the time of dinosaurs. Anything's possible." For his part, public servant Creaser wants to explore those possibilities - first-hand - for as long as he can. It's strange, but life rarely seems more exhilarating than when searching for its traces in the remains of a ghostly world...