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Australia’s largest Antarctic fossil collection at Monash
12 October 2005
Australia’s largest collection of Antarctic fossils has taken up residence at Monash University.
The collection of more than 1000 fossils features invertebrates (including shells with their original mother-of-pearl still intact), leaves and partial tree trunks, remains of giant penguins, vertebrae and teeth of large marine reptiles such as Plesiosaurs, and a 65-centimetre-long skull cast of a meat-eating Therapod dinosaur.
http://www.monash.edu.au/news/monashmemo/stories/20051012/fossils.html
Wasn't Antarctic always down there...?
and hasn't down there always been the coldest part of the Globe?
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The landscape has probably been preserved beneath the ice sheet for around 14 million years
Which means ,...if it hasn't moved ...that prior to 14 million years ago it wasn't frozen all the time....
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Wonder how they track where a piece of the crust is xxx years ago?
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The Paleozoic is bracketed by two of the most important events in the history of animal life. At its beginning, multicelled animals underwent a dramatic "explosion" in diversity, and almost all living animal phyla appeared within a few millions of years. At the other end of the Paleozoic, the largest mass extinction in history wiped out approximately 90% of all marine animal species. The causes of both these events are still not fully understood and the subject of much research and controversy. Roughly halfway in between, animals, fungi, and plants alike colonized the land, the insects took to the air, and the limestone shown in this picture was deposited near Burlington, Missouri.
The Paleozoic took up over half of the Phanerozoic, approximately 300 million years. During the Paleozoic there were six major continental land masses; each of these consisted of different parts of the modern continents. For instance, at the beginning of the Paleozoic, today's western coast of North America ran east-west along the equator, while Africa was at the South Pole.