Etched into rock at a dusty cattle station in outback South Australia is the richest collection of Ediacaran fossils in the world. The half-a-billion-year-old creatures, more alien than any animal seen today, may never have been unearthed if not for this fourth-generation stockman.
For almost 40 years, South Australian cattle farmer Ross Fargher has been the guardian of buried treasure, his extraordinary find exposing hidden secrets to life on Earth.
The 63-year-old has dedicated most of his life to the family cattle business at Nilpena Station on the rugged western fringe of the Flinders Ranges.
The arid property is about the same size as New York City.
While cattle roamed the land for generations, there was something special locked in the rock underneath.
It would become the crown jewel of a UNESCO World Heritage bid.
In 1985, the young and laidback farmer was inside his woolshed and showing his friend, Pam Hasenhor, ripples in sandstone used as flooring in the structure, which was first built in the 1870s.
"She got excited when she saw the ripple marks on the floor and asked where they might have come from," Mr Fargher says.
"We went for a drive up on the hills.
"I knew there was a lot of this ripple material that I'd seen when mustering.
"We didn't walk very far before we spotted fossils."
Initially, Mr Fargher was not blown away by the find, but as more and more fossils were unearthed, he realised he had stumbled across a remarkable slice of history.
Overturned rock slabs the size of tennis courts showed communities of ancient marine life that existed in the Ediacaran Period, between 538 and 640 million years ago.
They lived at a time when the Flinders Ranges was covered by shallow tropical ocean.
A sandstorm would wipe out all of the soft-bodied creatures, their existence only recorded once the sand turned to stone.
"It became more of a mind-blowing experience as to how extremely important they are worldwide," Mr Fargher says.
As the gatekeeper of the fossils, he limited access to palaeontologists for research and ensured the creatures remained at their final resting sites.
He did not want them removed, and researchers were only allowed to study them onsite.
The researchers did not focus on individual fossils, but flipped over slabs of ancient seabed to determine how the creatures interacted with each other.
"They were getting a snapshot in time of exactly what lived at that time period, how they moved, how they fed," Mr Fargher says.
One of the fossils found at the site was the Spriggina – the first evidence of a creature with a head.
Exclusive to the Flinders, it has not been found anywhere else in the world, and is now the fossil emblem for South Australia.
It was named after geologist Reg Sprigg.
He first discovered Ediacaran fossils in the Flinders, about 20 kilometres north of the Nilpena site, in 1946.
Others have been named after Sir David Attenborough, former US president Barack Obama and Mr Fargher's wife Jane.
All have been driving forces behind protecting the fossils.
From buried to public treasure
After decades behind a locked gate, the extensive fossil field will next week become an outdoor public museum.
The South Australian government will open the Nilpena Ediacara National Park on Thursday, after purchasing two-thirds of Nilpena Station from the Fargher family in 2016.
While the fossils have left a deep impression in the heart of their finder, the stockman knew they needed to be protected and shared with the rest of the world.
He decided the best option was for the site to become a national park.
"We thought it's alright while we're here — we'll protect the site," Mr Fargher says.
"But at some point, we're not going to be here, so we thought for future generations, we'll have to do something."
Ross and Jane Fargher will stay on as caretakers of the site's fossil beds until a ranger is appointed.
But for the past seven years they have worked with Jason Irving.
He heads up the national parks program for the state government, and the Nilpena Ediacara National Park has been a passion project.
"The first time I went up there I was blown away by the fact that these half-a-billion-year-old fossils — the beginning of animal life — were laid out on the hillside," Mr Irving says.
"[I] was just blown away by how fragile it is, but also by how resilient it is, that it's been out here for so long.
"I'm deeply in love with the Flinders."
Mr Irving travelled to the United States to see how some of its woolly mammoth fossil sites had been managed once converted into national parks.
Over there, tourists line up for hours to get a glimpse of 300,000-year-old mammoths, and sites are now overrun with visitors.
He realised that opening up Nilpena to everybody could create chaos.
To prevent that, the Nilpena Ediacara National Park will at first be limited to guided tours, so numbers can be controlled and valuable fossils protected from theft.
"The only way you can really manage a special place like this … is by having quite a strong security regime and guided tours only," Mr Irving says.
But the restrictions will give tourists a more intimate and comprehensive experience with the fossils.
"[The park] brings together all those amazing things about Australia — the pastoral history, the Aboriginal history, and our very deep and special environment that we have here," Mr Irving says.
When she was a girl, Adnyamathanha woman Beverley Patterson heard stories from her ancestors about the Ediacaran fossils at Nilpena.
"I love Nilpena. It's where I grew up, roaming that country," she says.
For her, it is a "good thing" the fossils can now be protected not only as a national park, but also potentially as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
"To us, it's important the Adnyamathanha name is going to go all over the world," she says.
"It's a beautiful little place, and it's home to me, my children, my grandchildren — I want them to grow up and look after the country."
Ms Patterson will be part of the Welcome to Country during the park opening on Thursday, where she will share the story of the Ediacara, which she says was named after the Adnyamathanha word for the zebra finch, a bird local to the area.
While culturally significant for the Adnyamathanha, the Flinders fossils piqued the interest of palaeontologists all over the world, eager to work out their place in evolution.
For more than two decades, American palaeontologist Mary Droser and her young family have travelled from Riverside, south-east of Los Angeles, to study the Nilpena rocks.
"I first came [to Nilpena Station] when my kids were in diapers and now they're in grad school," Dr Droser says.
She has been studying the fossils since 2001, and says it is a "dream come true" they will now be protected in a national park.
"It's the best fossil record of the dawn of animal life," she says.
"They are a huge part of Australia's legacy, and South Australia's legacy.
"There's no place like it in the world."
For Dr Droser, there are two crucial outcomes that the national park will secure.
The first is sharing the site with the public, and the second is conserving it for future generations.
'Just like opening Tutankhamun's tomb'
While Ediacaran fossils can be found in places like Namibia and Russia, SA Museum palaeontologist Diego Garcia-Bellido says the Nilpena collection is the most extensive in existence.
"The diversity and sheer amount of fossils of the Flinders Ranges is the best anywhere," he says.
"There's such a rich series of sites.
"When you open a site like Nilpena Ediacara National Park, you are telling South Australians: 'This is your heritage, these are your rocks, these are your fossils'.
"You should be proud of what you've got here."
Associate Professor Garcia-Bellido says new fossils are still being discovered at Nilpena Station.
"When you turn over a slab that has been buried for half-a-billion years and you lay eyes on something no human eyes have seen, it's a very exciting feeling," he says.
"I think it's comparable to maybe what Howard Carter felt when he opened Tutankhamun's tomb.
"You are opening something that has never been seen before."
As part of his work, the Spanish-born researcher and his team extracted two cores — at a depth of 65 and 75 metres — of Nilpena rock, in order to study the environmental conditions at the time the organisms were buried by sand.
Last year, the cores travelled back to Adelaide and will be analysed over the next two-to-three years.
It's hoped that the cores can reveal the exact age of the Flinders fossils, as Australian researchers are currently working off a guide from a study of similar fossils found in Russia.
That research, along with that conducted by Dr Droser, will form part of the "dossier" that will go to Paris as part of the UNESCO World Heritage nomination, which is set to be voted on in 2026.
"That will be very exciting when all that comes to fruition," Mr Fargher says.
"It will give another, overall, protection to the site so we'll be able to sleep easy.
"I think a lot of people haven't really known where Ediacara is or what Ediacara is, but it will be on the map very soon."
With a landscape resembling the surface of Mars, it is hardly surprising that NASA is funding some of the fossil research.
"It's a lot cheaper to go back in time and find out how we evolved on this planet than it is to get to other planets," Mr Fargher says.
Associate Professor Garcia-Bellido wholeheartedly agrees — for him, the Ediacaran creatures are "the closest thing we've got to aliens on our planet".
"We've got [life] forms that never again appear in the fossil records," he says.
"We're all descendent from a common ancestor and we've all got a common set of [characteristics].
"That's why NASA is supporting our research.
"If we need to look at what's out there, it's going to look more Ediacaran than anything we see around us today."
Credits
Author: Meagan Dillon
Photography and video: Che Chorley
Digital production: Daniel Keane
Video production: Sebastian Dixon
Editor: Jessica Haynes
