Ancient fish fits weird bill
PALAEONTOLOGISTS have reconstructed an ancient Australian fish that swam on the sea floor like a stingray and had the bill of a platypus.
Fossils that date back 400 million years have allowed scientists to piece together a picture of the strange fish, which had nostrils coming from its eye sockets and a long bill or snout with jaws.
It is named Brindabellaspis after the Brindabella Range near Canberra and belongs to an extinct group of armoured prehistoric fish known as placoderms.
Scientists from the Australian National University and Flinders University have dated the fossils to the early Devonian period, more than 175 million years before the first dinosaurs.
They were discovered in limestone around the Lake Burrinjuck dam at the head of the Murrumbidgee River, north of The Brindabellas in NSW. The area contains some of the earliest reef fish fauna and the world’s finest example of an ancient tropical coral reef.
It was a thriving biodiversity hot spot that rivals the Great Barrier Reef of today.
Palaeobiologist Dr Gavin Young, who discovered the first fossils in 1969, says Brindabellaspis is the strangest of the more than 70 species of fish found in the ancient ecosystem. “This thing is really weird, it doesn’t really fit in anywhere,” he said.