Australasian Fossils: A Students' Manual of PalaeontologyChapman, Frederick
Science
Australasian Fossils: A Students' Manual of Palaeontology
Chapman, Frederick
Paleontology -- Australia
Good collections of shells of the Balcombian series may be easily made at
Balcombe's Bay and Grice's Creek, Port Phillip. They can there be dug out
of the grey-blue clay with a knife, and afterwards cleaned at leisure by
means of a soft tooth brush dipped in water. In the cement stone at the
same place there are numerous shells of pteropods or "sea-butterflies"
(_Vaginella_), and specimens of the stone may be obtained, showing myriads
of the porcelain-like shells, and also their internal casts in the hard
greenish coloured matrix.
The ferruginous or ironstone beds seen in the Flemington Railway cutting,
Melbourne, is an old marine shell-bank, resting on basalt. The shells have
all been dissolved away, and only their casts and moulds remain. These
impressions are, however, so faithfully moulded that the ornamentation
of each shell can often be reproduced on a squeeze taken with a piece of
modelling wax or plasticine. Such fossil remains are easily collected by
carefully breaking up the blocks of ironstone with a hammer.
Quarries in the older limestones and mudstones in Victoria, New South
Wales and other States, are often good hunting grounds for fossils. The
quarry at Cave Hill, Lilydale, for example, will be found very profitable,
for the limestone is full of corals and molluscan shells; whilst the
friable or rubbly portion is worth breaking down for the smaller fossils.
The bed-rock (Silurian) of Melbourne is in places very fossiliferous;
the sandstones of Moonee Ponds Creek generally affording a fair number
of brachiopods, and occasionally corals. The mudstones of South Yarra,
Studley Park, Yan Yean, and other places on the same geological horizon,
contain a rich fauna, to be obtained only by the assiduous collector
who will search over and break up a large number of blocks. Practice
in this work makes a good collector; although of course one must know
something about the objects looked for, since many apparently obscure
fossil remains of great interest might easily be passed over for lack
of knowledge as to what should be expected to occur at each particular
locality.
Many other good collecting grounds might here be alluded to, but we have
purposely cited only a few near Melbourne, since a selection from other
parts of Australasia may easily be made from the localities mentioned in
connection with the various groups of fossils dealt with in the systematic
portion of this work.
=Preservation of Fossils.--=
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