The Age of Fishes

Today we went to Canowindra 110k south west of here to visit the heritage site with World famous fish fossils. Back in 1956 a road worker bulldozed a huge rock which he thought was interesting. Now there is a dedicated museum with visitors as famous as David Attenborough ( not to mention us ).

Some info gained from our trip:
The Devonian period was 416-359m years ago. Named after Devon in England where they found fossils from this period. It is referred to as The Age of Fishes. Apparently 2 fish of the same species are 2 fish (plural) but fish of different species are fishes ( plural). I didn’t know that.

There were shallow seas, odd creatures and plants in this area. Schools of fish were washed into a small billabong and left stranded, afterwards another event washed more water with a lot of sediment into the billabong killing the fish( es) on mass. This is the only known fossil of the Canowindra grossi which is an air breathing lobe finned fish, along with about 100 other specimens.

It was an interesting visit and the drive was lovely through pretty farming country. We had lunch at the RSL club. We thought the town was pretty quiet. When we went into the club we found out why, everyone was at a wake. No problem apart from the high noise level - we all had fish for lunch.