Author: Gavin Charles Young, Departmental Visitor, Materials Physics, Research School of Physics, Australian National University

Queensland is renowned for its fossils of Australia’s largest back-boned animals – dinosaurs, of course, like the Jurassic Rhoetosaurus, the Cretaceous Wintonotitan, and other large sauropods. However, our new paper published in the journal National Science Review documents the smallest vertebrate fossil animal described so far from the state. It’s a highly enigmatic tiny “fish” from a remote location close to the Northern Territory border. It lived in the shallow margins of a marine environment about 400 million years ago. A scattering of its skeletal elements was preserved in a small limestone outcrop at the southern end of the Toomba…