The Age of Fishes, Canowindra

In 1955 a road worker grading a road about 10 kilometres west of Canowindra, in central-west New South Wales, turned up a large rock slab covered in unusual, footprint-like impressions. He did not know what it was and pushed it to the fence, and the roadworks went on. Bill Simpson, a local apiarist, later found it, suspected fossils and contacted the Australian Museum's palaeontologist, Harold Fletcher. With Ted Rayner, Fletcher confirmed the find and took the slab to Sydney, where it went on display in 1966. It has since come home to Canowindra.

Decades later the palaeontologist Alex Ritchie led a dig at the spot, in 1993, taking 70 tonnes of rock from under the road. The slabs held more than 3,000 fish from the Late Devonian, about 370 to 360 million years ago, and the site has since yielded more than 4,000 specimens of eight species. They all lie on a single bedding plane, a whole community of fish trapped in a pool that dried up and killed them, then buried quickly and quietly by incoming sediment with little disturbance to their skeletons. A single slab shows the last days of that drying lake. Larger fish crowded the deepest water and the smaller ones were pushed to the edge, leaving a dense band of small fish along the old shoreline, and beyond it a few that tried to crawl out and were stranded.

Armoured antiarch placoderms of two kinds, Bothriolepis and Remigolepis, make up 97 percent of the fauna. The arthrodire Groenlandaspis is much rarer, with about 50 specimens, and the lobe-finned fishes rarer still, about 20 individuals. Among them are Canowindra grossi, the lungfish Soederberghia simpsoni and the top predator, Mandageria fairfaxi, an air-breathing lobe-fin up to two metres long with a 40-centimetre skull lined with rows of large conical teeth and an unusual working neck joint.

The finds are kept at the Age of Fishes Museum in Canowindra, opened in 1998 in a building designed by the architect John Andrews. It is one of only two museums of Devonian fish fossils in the world; its sister is at Miguasha in Quebec. The site is part of Australia's National Heritage for its international scientific importance. In 2019 the Australian Museum and the Age of Fishes Museum scanned nearly 200 of the large slabs into 3D models in just over a week, and the museum won a gold medal in specialised tourism services at the Country and Outback Regional Tourism Awards in 2018.