The Age of Fishes, Canowindra

In 1955 roadworks near Canowindra in New South Wales turned up a large slab of rock covered in unusual impressions, and the crew set it aside by the road and carried on. A local beekeeper later came across it, thought it held fossils, and contacted the Australian Museum. In 1993 the palaeontologist Alex Ritchie led a dig at the spot where the slab had been found: 70 tonnes of rock came out, holding more than 3,000 fish from the Devonian, over 360 million years ago, and the site has kept producing new discoveries. The finds are in the Age of Fishes Museum in Canowindra, opened in 1998 in a building by the architect John Andrews, one of only two museums of Devonian fish fossils in the world; the other, its sister, is at Miguasha in Quebec. The museum is a National Heritage site for its international scientific importance.