OFR 151.pdf - CRC LEME

colleges usually hold extensive collections dating back to the mid nineteenth century. In
some instances, the institutional holdings may be the only fossiliferous material to survive,
due to shaft collapse, or because weathering over the past century has destroyed the
microfossil content of sediments exposed in the mine or quarry face. Examples of both occur
in the deep lead gold fields in New South Wales and Victoria (M.K. Macphail pers. observ.).
4. Early journals
Nineteenth and early twentieth journals published by the Royal Societies often include
comment on fossil specimens ‘tabled’ by members. A search through nineteenth century
issues of the Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania has resulted in the rediscovery
of important Tertiary macrofossil sites in Tasmania (G. Jordan pers. comm.).
8.2.2 Improved taxonomy
Unlike macrofossil taxonomy, which is thriving thanks to the work of R.S. Hill and
colleagues at the Universities of Adelaide and Tasmania, the taxonomy of Cretaceous and
Tertiary microfossils is living on over-draft from work undertaken on the southern margin
basins in the 1960s to 1970s (C.B. Foster pers. comm.). At present, formally described
microfossil species are complemented by a sizeable number of informal (manuscript) species
that may or may not be in wide use, and the existence of many more undescribed species is
documented only by photomicrographs held in private archives maintained by
palynostratigraphic consultants, e.g. Mary Dettmann, Clinton Foster, Robin Helby, Mike
Macphail, Helene Martin and Alan Partridge.
These private archives potentially allow bioclimatic and chronostratigraphic connections to be
made between widely separated sites, or sites analysed many years apart. For example the
undescribed spore of an extinct possibly aquatic fern, first recorded by E.M. Truswell in a
Late Cretaceous microflora from central Australia in the early 1970s, was found in a probable
correlative microflora from the Hamersley Ranges by M.K. Macphail in 1999.
Continuing systematic documentation of these and other undescribed taxa is essential to
reconstructing geographic patterns in the Cretaceous and Tertiary flora, vegetation and
climate in inland Australia; and developing local spore-pollen based palynostratigraphies for
northeastern and northwestern Australia, which can be tied to the independently dated marine
sequences.
8.2.3 Improved processing
Plant microfossil assemblages are usually biased by processing and therefore may give a false
impression of past floras, vegetation and past climate. For example, the dominant pollen
types in many Neogene assemblages (Cunoniaceae, Elaeocarpaceae and/or some Myrtaceae)
are