Hey everyone, and welcome to World Heritage Journey. For today's video,
we're at the Flinders Ranges, of southern Australia.
So this isn't actually a World Heritage Site - yet. It's what's known as a "Tentative"
World Heritage Site, part of the process for becoming a full Site, which they're hoping to
achieve in 2024. So why is it going to become a World Heritage Site? Well, it's not just for the
magnificent landscape that you can see behind me. The Flinders Ranges was also home to a key part,
a missing piece of the puzzle, in the story of evolution. Let's check it out.
The Flinders Ranges, also known as Ikara,
is located in the east of South Australia, on the traditional lands
of the Adnyamathanha, the traditional owners and custodians of these lands.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Australia is old. Incredibly old.
And with almost no earthquakes, volcanoes or tectonic plates altering the landscape,
many parts of Australia have remained almost completely unchanged
for hundreds of millions of years - particularly, the spectacular Flinders Ranges.
It's this permanent, unchanging nature that makes the Ranges so special, and so important.
For a century, biologists had puzzled over what's known as the Cambrian Explosion, an event 500
million years ago when complex life forms began appearing quite suddenly in the fossil record.
Because of evolution, there must surely have been an intermediate step between the forms of life,
like bacteria and algae, and the enormous variety and complexity of the Cambrian Explosion.
Enter: the Flinders Ranges.
In 1946, a geologist named Reginald Sprigg
discovered a treasure trove of fossils in the area. Entirely pre-dating the Cambrian Explosion,
the fossil finds were astounding in both quality and quantity, giving biologists an incredibly
detailed look at the missing link between pre and post Cambrian life.
These days, some key parts of the collection are on display at the South Australian Museum
in Adelaide. And it's an awe-inspiring group of fossils, showing a huge variety of creatures,
dating to around 550 million years ago. Some are simple organisms like sponges,
while others were able to move about under their own power.
There's a huge variety of sizes as well, ranging from tiny fingernail sizes,
to coin sized, hand sized, and even some larger ones too - up to a metre across!
There's clear signs of semi-complex life here, with primitive skeletons, brains,
and digestive systems - the building blocks of the entire animal kingdom.
It's genuinely impressive stuff, and quite humbling to realise that almost all life
on earth has evolved from these primitive sea creatures - the world's oldest known animals.
And it was so crucial to understanding the story of evolution, that an entire geological time
period, the Ediacaran, is now named after the area where these fossils were first discovered.
Well, that's it from me here at the Flinders Ranges. It's such a magnificent landscape,
like you can see behind me, and it's just so important to the history of life on earth as well,
and I really hope it does become a proper World Heritage Site in the near future,
and I'm sure you'll agree with me as well. But thank you very much for watching,
I'm Joel on the Road, leave me a thumbs-up if you liked the video, and hit subscribe
if you'd like to see more from the World Heritage Journey. I'll see you next time.