![]() “When we saw the dense sensory tubes on another broken snout, we immediately thought of the local platypus,” he says. Clearly this ancient reef was a thriving hotspot for evolution, as are the coral reefs of more recent times”. “There are over 70 species of fish known from this ancient coral reef ecosystem, and this finding shows they came in all shapes and sizes. Limestone outcrops on the shores of Lake Burrinjuck preserve an ancient reef fish fauna from an estimated 400 million years ago. “This is a fossil site that just keeps giving,” says Dr Young from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. “We imagine it used the bill to search for prey, somewhat like a platypus, while the eyes on top of the head looked out for danger from above.”ĭr Gavin Young, who has spent more than 50 years researching fossil fish from Lake Burrinjuck, found the first two specimens but the sensitive snout region was missing. “We suspect that this animal was a bottom-dweller,” says Professor John Long. The paper, ‘New information on Brindabellaspis stensioi Young, 1980, highlights morphological disparity in Early Devonian placoderms’ (2018), by Benedict King, Gavin C Young and John A Long, has been published in Royal Society Open Science. ![]() The fossil had another surprise: a unique sensory system on the snout which turned out to be a modified form of the pressure sensor system found in other fish. There was this long snout at the front, and the jaws were positioned very far forward,” he says. “The eyes were on top of the head, and the nostrils came out of the eye sockets. “This was one strange looking fish,” says study author Benedict King, a Flinders University graduate now based Naturalis Biodiversity Centre in Leiden, Netherlands. Now palaeontologies from Flinders University and the Australian National University have reconstructed two of the ancient fossils and discovered the fish had a long bill extending out in front of its eyes. ![]() The fossil, named Brindabellaspis after the nearby Brindabella Ranges, belong to an extinct group called the placoderms and was first found in 1980 in limestone around Lake Burrinjuck in NSW, an area containing some of the the world’s earliest known reef fish fauna from about 400 million years ago. Scientists in Australia have discovered a remarkable ancient fish fossil with a long snout, reminiscent of a platypus bill. ![]() Life reconstruction of the 'platypus fish' by Jason art, Shenzhen ![]()
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