This is a guest post from Christopher Raja, an Alice Springs-based writer. His play, The First Garden, co written with Natasha Raja and based on the life of Olive Pink, is published by Currency Press.

His novel The Burning Elephant is represented by The Colchie Agency and A Wyatt Book, Inc.

Chris was recently awarded and Australia Council Literature Board grant for New Work (Emerging Writers).

Everything was perfectly silent until a few volunteers led by Dr Adam Yates, the paleontologist in charge of the excavation, climbed up to the top of Cow Pat Hill. Cow Pat Hill looks like the name suggests. It resembles cow dung.

‘This place represents a different type of mega fauna from the main bone bed down below, past the main basin, generators, and camp,’ said Adam.

We stand at South Quarry and I have to remind myself what a paleontologist is.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. I take a sip of water and bend down to tie my shoelace.

‘It’s one of the quarries the museum has opened up,’ he replied. ‘Woodburne called it Hill One,’ said Adam. ‘Woodburne was an American paleontologist who was a student of Ruben Stirten an American Professor at the University of California. Stirten came to Australia to look for mammals. He basically kick started mammal paleontology. Woodburne was his student and was given Alcoota as his PHD project and he did the first paleontology study of Alcoota.’

Adam prefers to call it Cow Pat Hill. ‘It’s a classic stream deposit,’ he said and dates the hill to be around six million years old. ‘There is Zygomaturus gilli down at the main pit. It’s not here. It’s a browsing marsupial that belongs to an extinct family of Diprotodontidae.’ I’m trying to keep up. It’s getting warm. The desert sun is becoming a force to reckon with as we make our way to the top of the hill and it is on the top of Cow Pat Hill that we find the first evidence in this area for the activities of a brand new species. Here we find activity of deliberate stone tool manufacture. The Aborigines utilized the silkcrete as it is incredibly hard and it flakes, to make tools with.

It’s a great view from top of Cow Pat Hill. The rest of the volunteers are below working in the main pits trying to excavate the bones of animals that roamed the earth ten million years ago. I secretly hope they find evidence of an ancient man. The first man! The main pit is older. Eight million seems about the consensus. We make our way back down.

As Adam is talking to the volunteers, about the river washing down ancient animal bones to leave deposits here, he finds a piece of bone. He picks it up and inspects it. He placed the bone back where he found it. As we reach the bottom of the hill he’s talking about Barru, a large robust crocodile that ambushed its prey, grabbed and killed its prey on the spot, and Quincarna<, another type of crocodile, that used slashing bites when attacking its prey like a shark. Barru has spike like teeth whereas Quincarna has blade like teeth. These giant crocodiles fed entirely on big game.

He considers the direction the water was draining these animals millions of years ago. I can’t help but think of the contrast between the silence and sterility of the scene as we looked upon it now and the fertility and abundance of life which must have characterised it when in bygone years fresh water sources were surrounded by varied plants and herbage amongst which huge Driprotodons and birds as large as camels browsed. Alcoota is a unique window.

‘From here,’ said Adam, ‘we get to know what is going on in the heart of the continent at this crucial time, the beginning of the big dry, literally at the time when the drying out of Australia begun.’

‘Central Australia ten million years ago,’ he continued, as we surveyed the dry red landscape, ‘was a much wetter place with dense woodland. It was a place where large plant eating animals existed.’

Adam is standing amidst Mitchell grass. It’s a grass even I recognise but there are so many types of grasses out here. He reaches for a stone near his foot. He points out crystal quartz. The crystals are microscopic grains made of the stuff that makes opal.

As we head down, beyond Cow Pat Hill, make our way back to where the others are camping, we pass a table of various specimens. Adam points out a piece of the lower jaw of an early ancestor of a marsupial lion, Wakaleo alcootaensis, a very large carnivore. This animal reached the size of a modern African lion. He points out its large pointy incisors. Sitting on the table nearby are more specimens: bits of bones, jaws and teeth. Most of the other mammals have teeth that point forward, this one has teeth that points up.
It is the first piece of its kind the museum has found in thirty years.

I am lost in my own thoughts. My brain thinks of other animals that might have roamed here. As I wonder what the local Aboriginal people from here make of the large bones that are found in the ground here I can hear Adam telling one of the volunteers they are looking at the tooth of a mammal.

‘A diprotodon! ‘It is a giant relative of the modern wombat,’ said Adam.

‘As the place began to dry out,’ Adam explains, ‘animals were tethered to waterholes. There were few water sources left. There was no water on the landscape for animals to drink. Animals were unable to move long distances. Lots of animals were trapped. They could not move on. If they did they would die before they reached the next water source. The one source of water that was remaining was the really big waterhole Alcoota. This meant that lots of animals were trapped here. There was less and less water and these animals had eaten all the food around the water hole and gradually they began to starve and die.’

Adam is passionate about his subject as well as being very smart. A group of volunteers gather around. They range in age but mostly they are an older crowd and I wished I had come along with my children.

‘There are at least three thousand animals buried there,’ he continued.

I look around and imagine when floodwaters came crashing through here. The waters pickup all of the bones, rolled them up together into a complete big jumble, dumped them in the channel and this is what we find. There is a logjam of bones extending for hundreds of meters.

To excavate these bones is an extremely delicate process and the job requires volunteers. From where I stand I have a good view of Cow Pat Hill. I can see the site. Cow Pat Hill is a younger spot to where I stand now. The animals, I recall, that are found at Cow Pat Hill date back to around six million years. Below where I am standing at the base of the camp, the site where the volunteers are working, is dated to be around eight to ten million years. The volunteers use special ointments and brushes. They are hunched over in pits brushing ancient bones.

Top volunteer and legendary botanist of Central Australia, Peter Latz has been volunteering here for so long he has his own pit. He’s excavating a colossal bird. He brushes the bird with a thin brush, applies glue on the bones and brushes some more.

Peter Latz at Cow Pat Hill

This unique, giant, Australian flightless bird, Dromornithidae or Mihirung was once common across Australia. It looks a bit like a camel. These birds ranged from the very large to the gigantic. The details of the skull, the bones at the back and the bones of the pelvis indicate that this bird is a kind of giant duck. Some people nickname this duck the demon duck of doom.

When Peter’s friend, P. F. Murrey was researching the book, Magnificent Mihirungs: The colossal flightless birds of the Australian Dreamtime, he learnt, ‘the birds had salt glands so they could drink salty water.’

It’s estimated that this bird was around three metres tall and weighed around five hundred kilograms. We look at its shinbone or tibiotarsus. He points out the knee end. The foot swiveled on enormous con dials. ‘There is evidence,’ said Adam, ‘these large birds were plant eaters and not really a demon after all.’

Diprotodon tibia

Out here it’s hard not to get awed by the enormity of time and space. Holding and seeing these ancient bones I am reminded that extinction is a part of life. Looking at the volunteers, scratch away at the earth and dust, I get the feeling each one is living out a childhood dream.

We know the earth has gone through many extinction attempts.

We know that one extinction event wiped out dinosaurs.

Looking at these mega fauna we can only wonder what will be uncovered in the next ten million years.