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Amateur fossil hunters find unknown ancient fish skull
Last updated at 23:37pm on 28.11.06
The fish has never been seen, alive or fossilised, in the history of the world.
When two amateur fossil hunters cracked open a rock in the Australian outback they thought the preserved skull they uncovered was unlike anything they had found in all their earlier adventures.
It was more than 6ft long with a rounded snout and large blade-like teeth.
The force of the fish's bite is 40times that used by a pressure hose to blast away garden dust and grime.
"Looks like a swordfish," remarked Tom Hurley to his wife Sharon.
"Nah," said Sharon, "I reckon it's an old barracuda." In fact, it turned out to be something in between - and what's more, it was a fish that had never been seen, alive or fossilised, in the history of the world.
What Tom and Sharon had found was the skull of a fish that lived more than 100 million years ago, swimming in the southern ocean when Australia was effectively a Polar continent.
Their discovery has excited geologists and palaeontologists around the globe.
Tom and Sharon handed the skull over to the South Australian Museum, the state where they live, and after many months of research and study of the fossil experts concluded that the amateur hunters had found a totally unknown species of fish.
Museum research fellow Ben Kear said that what the couple had found was believed to be the ancestor of the previously-discovered protosphyraena, a large, predatory carnivorous species that prowled the waters off Europe and North America some 80 million years ago.
But the remains of the fish that the Hurleys found had terrorised smaller sea creatures some 20 million years earlier, when Australia was partially covered in sea and was part of what we know today as the South Pole.
Dr Kear said the discovery opened up the possibility of more species waiting to be discovered in the Australian outback, much of which was either covered in trees or water when the fearsome fish existed.
"In Australia, in particularly, which is a very big and very empty place, there's a lot of ground to cover," he said.
"The beauty of this, and the tantalising part is...who knows what else is out there?" Dr Kear is in the process of writing a scientific paper on the find, which will be published next year. His paper will give the species a name and while it remains closely guarded until publication the name will honour its finders, the Hurleys.
"We're going to honour their discovery and honour their keen eyes by naming this fish after them," said Dr Kear.
