Victoria has an excellent fossil record of fishes from the Devonian Period (411-355 million years ago), with exceptionally well-preserved specimens from the Buchan district in east Gippsland, and from the Mt Howitt region, in central Victoria.
The fishes of this time included ancient armoured shark-like forms called placoderms, spiney shark-like forms called acanthodians, and early bony fishes (Osteichthyes) such as the ray-finned palaeoniscoids and various groups of lobe-finned fishes, including lungfishes and the fish-like ancestors of the first land animals. Victoria has the oldest known records of some of these fishes, such as the earliest coelacanth in the world.
The study of these fossils not only shed slight on the early evolution and diversification of the first fishes, but provides a useful tool for dating the various rock strata throughout parts of Victoria. The first Devonian fishes known from Australia came from Victoria, published by Prof Edwin Hills in 1929, and these gave the first definite Devonian age to the central Victorian Palaeozoic sequences.
Research on early fish evolution is carried out by Dr John Long and Dr Tim Holland. In addition to collecting and studying the fossil fishes of Victoria, he has been actively searching other sites for fossil fishes of exceptional quality, in particular at the world famous Gogo sites in the north of Western Australia and from sites in central Australia.
The 3-D preserved skulls of Devonian fishes from Gogo is the subject of study using ultra fine CT scanning technology at the Australian National University in Canberra. These new techniques are yielding much new anatomical information about the early evolution of fishes, in particular showing the stages how fishes evolved into the first land animals (tetrapods).
Return to Palaeontology research