Revealing Riversleigh

Transcription of audio description at Exhibition entry

This audio guide to Revealing Riversleigh features four stops with information about the exhibition themes and descriptions of select displays. You can access this guide on the UNSW Library exhibition page or by scanning the QR codes using your own device or smartphone in the space. If you find my pronunciation to be off at times, it is because I am AI generated and am still learning. This is stop one, the exhibition introduction.

Welcome to the exhibition Revealing Riversleigh. The exhibition dates are 29 September 2025 to 13 March 2026, in the Level 5 exhibition space of UNSW Main Library. The room contains two adjoining walls with a large, dramatic wall graphic depicting a dry, grassy landscape with a rocky hill and scattered trees under a blue sky. Along the bottom the words "REVEALING RIVERSLEIGH" are printed on the wall, and a large rock with visible bones sits on the floor.

The wall text reads: "Uncover the extraordinary story of Australia’s ancient past through the fossil record of the Riversleigh World Heritage Area, located in Boodjamulla National Park on Waanyi Country in the lower Gulf region of Queensland. Renowned for its globally significant fossil discoveries, Revealing Riversleigh presents fossils etched out of limestone to reveal why they hold such vital clues to our continent’s past.

Spanning the last 25 million years, Riversleigh’s fossil record documents a period of dramatic transformation. Discoveries by teams of UNSW palaeontologists led by Professor Michael Archer and Professor Suzanne J Hand demonstrate how Australia’s unique wildlife evolved adaptations to cope with the cycles of natural climate change that reshaped the continent’s vast, ancient rainforests into the open forests, woodlands, and grasslands of today. The fossils include ancestors of familiar modern Australian marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas, as well as fascinating extinct groups such as marsupial lions, flesh-eating kangaroos, tree-climbing crocodiles, and creatures so strange they have names like ‘Thingodonta’.

The fossils in Revealing Riversleigh provide unique insights into the processes that shaped Australia’s present biodiversity. Understanding how life responded to ancient environmental shifts gives us powerful tools to anticipate and counter future challenges. This deep time perspective is now informing innovative conservation strategies, offering hope for critically endangered species like the Mountain Pygmy-possum facing the impacts of human-induced climate change. Revealing Riversleigh demonstrates how the past can help us understand the present in order to better protect the future.

We respectfully acknowledge the Waanyi peoples, on whose lands and waters the palaeontological fieldwork featured in this exhibition took place. UNSW Library stands on unceded lands of the Bedegal and Gadigal peoples."

Transcript of audio description at Gallery 1

This is the second stop in the audio guide for Revealing Riversleigh. This display, titled “Riversleigh Project”, features a glass display case containing fossil specimens and fieldwork tools, set against a large reddish-brown wall with a white outline of Queensland. The right side of the wall is covered with a collage of photographs depicting people conducting fieldwork in a dry, outdoor landscape, along with an impactful quote by Professor Michael Archer about the discovery of fossils. The quote reads, “I just fell to my knees and I don’t remember anything after that … within 10 minutes, we saw enough fossils to triple the number of Australian mammals known from the past 65 million years.”

Riversleigh’s fossils, in Waanyi country, were undoubtedly known to First Nations peoples for thousands of years. It was not until 1963 that mammal fossils were collected at Riversleigh, with the first expedition organised in 1976. Mike Archer, completely ‘hooked’ by what he saw during that first expedition, has returned annually for the last 50 years with many of his colleagues, including Sue Hand, Troy Myers, Anna Gillespie, Henk Godthelp, and Phil Creaser. This makes the Riversleigh Project the longest-running palaeontological project in Australia.

When palaeontologists find new Riversleigh fossil sites, they use a range of tools to quarry the bone bed, including hammers, chisels, and even light explosives to ‘carve’ the extremely hard limestone into portable blocks. After transporting the blocks to the laboratory at UNSW, they are processed using dilute acetic acid, which dissolves the limestone, leaving the chemically fortified fossils to emerge in the thousands. 

With decades of discovery at more than 300 fossil sites spanning the last 25 million years, scientists have collaborated to interpret the extraordinary record preserved in this place. Hundreds of new species have been found, with many representing the first known fossil records for a wide range of living groups such as lyrebirds, striped possums, and extremely mysterious creatures like ‘Thingodonta’. 

In 1994, the global significance of the fossil record at Riversleigh was recognised through its inclusion on the World Heritage List. Sir David Attenborough described it as one of the four most important fossil deposits in the World.  

Transcript of audio description at Gallery 2

This is the third stop in the audio guide for Revealing Riversleigh. This stop covers two displays in the exhibition about the AL90 site and bats. The left display features a large wall graphic depicting a dark cave interior, with tree roots hanging down. In front sits a black display case with bone fragments, skulls, and small jawbones. To the right is an adjacent reddish-brown wall with an oversized image of a bat clinging to a rock wall and a framed graphite illustration of a hanging bat clutching a small bird. The display case contains vials and small petri dishes filled with skulls and tiny fragments of microbat bones.

The Riversleigh World Heritage Area in Australia is a globally significant fossil site, largely due to its numerous fossilised cave systems that preserve a 25-million-year record of Australia's evolving fauna. The most notable discovery is the AL90 site, a completely filled-in cave fossil found in 1990 by UNSW student Alan Krikman and extensively excavated by palaeontologists, including Dr. Anna Gillespie.

The AL90 cave, which existed 15 million years ago during the Middle Miocene, was a pitfall trap on the rainforest floor that sealed in the remains of countless animals, including extinct sloth-like marsupials, fox-sized thylacines, tusked kangaroos, bandicoots, and millions of bats. The limestone infill preserved these skeletons, offering a spectacular glimpse into a species-rich past. Modern pitfall caves like the Forbes Inferno cave, pictured in the large wall graphic, demonstrate how these traps work, continuously collecting and preserving the remains of unlucky animals.

Riversleigh's fossil deposits are particularly rich in bat remains, yielding at least 44 previously unknown extinct species. Palaeontologists uncover these tiny, fragile fossils—often appearing as rows of teeth and wing bone fragments—by dissolving the surrounding limestone blocks with acetic acid. The extensive deep-time record of bats at Riversleigh is crucial because these creatures are bellwether species for climate change; studying how bat families responded to the three major climate change cycles over the last 25 million years provides vital context for understanding modern biodiversity responses to environmental shifts.

Transcript of audio description at Gallery 3

This is the fourth and final stop in the audio guide for Revealing Riversleigh. To the left of the room entry is a full-wall photograph of a Mountain Pygmy-possum with large, dark eyes and prominent whiskers, shown looking upward from a moss-covered, rocky surface. Adjacent to this is a green wall displaying a timeline and a series of overlapping images illustrating various flora, fauna, and landscapes, along with a quote attributed to Professor Michael Archer. The quote reads: “This is just a tiny part of the story Riversleigh reveals, we’ve only scratched the surface so far.”

These displays are about climate change and palaeoconservation. The critically endangered Mountain Pygmy-possum faces extinction as climate change eliminates the snow cover it needs for hibernation in the alpine zone. However, palaeontologists studying its 25-million-year history at the Riversleigh World Heritage Area discovered that its ancestors thrived in lowland, wet rainforests, suggesting the modern possum is stranded in an unsuitable habitat. Leveraging this fossil evidence, scientists established a successful non-alpine breeding facility in Lithgow, New South Wales. The ultimate goal is to reintroduce the possums into non-alpine wet forests, using the lessons of the past to guide their conservation in the present.

The Riversleigh fossil record, spanning 25 million years, documents how Australia's fauna responded to previous climate change cycles—a process where animals either went extinct, retreated to more comfortable habitats (like possums and rat-kangaroos), or adapted to new grasslands (like wombats and kangaroos). These outcomes provide a crucial framework for understanding how today's animals might react to current global warming.

Among the most valuable insights from Riversleigh is its documentation of the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum 17 million years ago, when global temperatures increased by 2 degrees Celsius. By studying the consequences of this past 2-degree Celsius warming event, scientists can more accurately anticipate which of Australia's species will be most vulnerable and require urgent intervention to survive the climate challenges they face today. This makes the Riversleigh fossil record an invaluable tool for global conservation efforts.