Millions of years ago, a series of interconnected waterholes provided refuge for the Territory’s now extinct megafauna surrounding what is now Alice Springs.

All that remains of this site is the Alcoota fossil beds, housing countless remnants of Australia’s wild history.

The fossils are unearthed and studied by palaeontologists and kept preserved in the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and overseen by their senior curator of earth sciences, Dr Adam Yates.

Adam is a palaeontologist with decades of experience studying extinct wildlife.

“I’ve been entranced by them since I can remember,” he says. “Since five I was an avid dinosaur lover and just never grew out of it.”

Adam has helped discover and identify several new species – from a prehistoric turtle, discovered near Kalkarindji to a recently uncovered species of ancient crocodile that he named Baru iylwenpeny, meaning “skilled hunter”.

Adam oversees the Territory’s largest fossil collection, to preserve these important relicts as well as help educate the public about our long distant, and unique, past.

“I’m chiefly in charge of the palaeontology collection at the museum, to maintain the fossil heritage of the NT and promote science to the wider public.”

Adam was raised in Adelaide but completed his post doctorate in England before moving to South Africa to entrench himself in the world of fossil hunting.

“I ended up in South Africa to start working on my favourite animals since childhood: dinosaurs.”

The country is a hotspot of fossil beds, often referred to as “the cradle of humankind” due to the number of early human remains discovered there.

“South Africa was fairly fresh out of the apartheid regime, and the government recognised that one of the areas the country could excel was in palaeontology.”

He was a lecturer at University of Witwatersrand, but was keen to come back to Australia.

“I had a family and wanted them to grow up here.”

Adam moved to the Territory in 2011, dedicating himself to the Alcoota fossil bed, which lies on a cattle station 115 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs.

He balances his time between curating the museum’s precious findings and unearthing fossils out in the field.

“I’m responsible for looking after the collection, performing research and making sure they’re all properly identified, and catalogued.”

Adam says the process of excavating newly discovered fossils is long and diligent.

“It really depends dramatically on the nature of the site and also where the site is. Is it remote land, private, a cattle station or Aboriginal land?”

Once a location has been scouted and experts suspect new findings lie underneath, decisions need to be made on how to remove them without damaging the delicate remains.

“It’s not quite like Jurassic Park,” says Adam. “We have to know if it’s super hard rock that needs heavy equipment or even explosives.”

Every new location is unique and requires different approaches.

“Sometimes the fossils are dense, and you choose a small spot to concentrate on or have to walk large expanses looking for fossils that might be eroding out.

“Once you’ve determined how much equipment you need and how many people, you start. Then it’s the thrill of discovery you never know quite what you’ll get.

“We have to slowly uncover a small part with brushes, and then harden what we find.

“We have to dribble a thin glue through all the cracks so we can actually get it out of the ground. It takes days and days, sometimes weeks, to get a fossil out of the ground.”

Adam relishes the excitement of the unexpected nature of his work.

“Even in Alcoota, we have a fairly good idea of what to find but there’s always something unexpected; we always get something exciting.”

The Alcoota beds are roughly eight million years old and have been home to more than 12,000 recorded fossils spanning 33 different species.

“Even if you keep finding the same species, you get to know the species more and more,” says Adam. “Males, females or juveniles, with a big sample size we can learn a lot about the species.”

The site is a lagerstätte, a sedimentary deposit filled with exceptionally well-preserved fossils due to the
area formerly being covered in water. Lagerstätte have even been known to preserve soft tissue in ancient remains, but not at Alcoota.

The site was discovered by an Aboriginal cattleman who noticed a strange looking bone half buried in the earth.

Adam theorises that the bone was most likely dug up by wild rabbits attempting to burrow into the ground.

He says important fossil beds are often discovered in unconventional ways.

“Another site that turned up recently was found by natural history amateurs who found chunks of rock from rubble used to build the nearby railway line.

“So we traced back to the site the rock was quarried from and just said, ‘This might be interesting – let’s go out and see what we find’.”

Once a new species is unearthed, the exciting detective work begins, determining through the bones what the new animal was and how it lived.

“The first thing we want to do is the basic anatomy and taxonomy to fit that species into a family tree and give it a name,” says Adam. “We want to know how it lived, what it evolved from or into or why it went extinct.”

Every new find is unique and demands a diverse team of experts to uncover its secrets.

“They require different tool sets and knowledge bases, so different scientists will work on these for potentially decades,” says Adam. “You never do these things in isolation. I might lead but there’s a whole team. Science is collaborative.”

Adam laments the fact that while their work is fascinating and important for understanding Australia’s mysterious ecological history as an isolated island, funding can be hard to acquire.

“It can be difficult to convince granting bodies to fund exploration of completely new areas, only to potentially come back empty handed.”

Adam emphasises the need for this research and the museum.

“Museums are really important. They often get ignored or put at the bottom of priority lists, but they need to be kept for the public.”

The megafauna central at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory features a plethora of real fossils on display to help educate the public on the once forgotten history that has been lying beneath the Territory for millions of years.

“It’s for public outreach and promoting the importance of what we’ve got,” says Adam. “Really, it’s the story of the Territory.”