New South Wales contains a number of fossil sites dating from human contact to hundreds of millions of years old. They are of significant international heritage value. The sites have been the subjects of scientific endeavour, much of it undertaken by Australian scientists over the past century that has revealed a wide range of prehistoric creatures from dinosaurs to marsupial lions. They have helped piece together the prehistory of the region and patterns of changing climates and vegetation. The fossil trail will link the most important sites in central western New South Wales. It starts in Bathurst and proceeds through Canowindra, Wellington and onto Lightning Ridge. Smaller fossil sites in a number of places including Coonabarabran and Brewarrina will be linked via 'sub-trails'.

The trail will be an exemplar project linking these sites with other attractions such as Dubbo Zoo and encouraging visitors to extend their stay within the region. Each of the sites also presents opportunities for local employment.

Because families and individuals of all ages are universally fascinated by prehistoric creatures, and because Australia's prehistoric creatures are utterly unique within the world, international tourism into Sydney and regional and rural New South Wales will be significantly expanded by this initiative. It should result in much higher visitation rates and regional benefits, particularly through international tourism, than has been achieved by relatively more expensive and isolated initiatives.

Because the 'terminal' site on this Fossil Trail is Lightning Ridge in northern NSW, this provides an opportunity to link across to Queensland which has similar fossil Trail proposals (e.g. focused on linking Winton [dinosaur trackway] in south central Queensland to Richmond [Cretaceous marine reptiles], Hughenden [Muttaburraurus dinosaur unique to Queensland) and Mount Isa [the World Heritage Riversleigh fossil sites]). These Queensland sites also complement rather than duplicate the stories told by New South Wales sites. This then would translate into a National rather than strictly NSW initiative, focused on rural and regional areas throughout.

Lightning Ridge Opal & Fossil Centre - Lightning Ridge

This proposal is to develop the only museum dedicated to Australia's National Gemstone, the opal, and the internationally important 100 million-year-old opalised fossils found at Lightning Ridge. These include a range of extraordinary cold-adapted, large-brained dinosaurs that lived within what was then the Antarctic Circle along with crocodiles, lungfish and flying reptiles. Strangest of all were the bizarre ancestors and cousins of the Platypus which, although today unique to Australia, at the time also occurred in the then united lands of Antarctica and South America.

Black opal was first discovered on Bundinbarrina Station, near what is now Lightning Ridge, in 1902. The museum will present some of the finest opals and opalised fossils and document the history and character of this unique mining community Renowned architect, Mr Glenn Murcutt has agreed to design the museum. That, in itself, is likely to be a drawcard.

The Australian Museum has custody of some of the finest opalised fossils from Lightning Ridge and continues to collect and undertake research on theni. New species are still being identified. The Museum has agreed to place much of the collection on loan in the opal and fossil museum. These fossils are rare, even more so as most are cut up for their opal content. The museum will assist in developing a greater appreciation of the importance of these fossils as a part of our heritage that will lead to more being saved and available for research and public enjoyment.

A number of these specimens will be on display shortly in a spectacular display in Sydney as part of the National Opal Collection, a joint initiative of the Australian Museum and Cody Opal Pty Ltd.

Somerville Collection museum development, Bathurst

The Somerville Collection comprises an internationally significant array of spectacular fossils from all around the world including a complete gecko in amber, a complete plesiosaur skeleton from Africa and a half-bird, half-dinosaur skeleton from China, as well as spectacular gems, crystals and other minerals, the lot valued at more than $15 million. The collection is being presented to the State of New South Wales, entrusted to the Australia Museum but on permanent display in Bathurst.

In Bathurst, it will be housed in one of the earliest purpose-built museums in regional Australia, constructed in 1902. Displays will be incorporated into a complex of heritage-listed buildings dating from 1876. The project includes conservation of these buildings which will also include displays about the development and history of Bathurst and surrounding regions. Bathurst is a rural centre for education. The museum will be developed in conjunction with Charles Sturt University and the Australian Museum and will complement the educational roles of both. Bathurst City Council will manage the museum.

Wellington Caves Interpretatiost Centre, Wellington

Wellington Caves contain some of the most spectacular Megafaunal fossils found anywhere in Australia including the enormous, flesh-eating marsupial lion, a range of giant kangaroos, the world's largest marsupials, huge koalas and a 7m long carnivorous goanna. The Wellington fossils range in age from approximately 30,000 years old to 4 million years old.

Fossils from Wellington Caves are also of enormous global significance in terms of the history of the world's science. When Charles Darwin visited Australia in the 1830s and saw the ancient thylacine, kangaroo and wombat fossils from Wellington Caves, it was the final trigger that convinced him beyond any doubt that the creatures of all lands had changed over time through the process he described as evolution.

The proposal seeks to enhance the visitor experience of the Wellington Caves, already a popular tourist destination, with the construction of a major interpretive centre similar to the Wonambi Centre at Naracoorte Caves. The latter has already had a huge impact on national and international tourism into South Australia, and a similar effect can be expected here.

The Age of Fishes Museum, Canowindra

Canowindra is the site of arguably the most important fossil fish deposit in the world. It is about 360 million years old and represents the accumulations of an ancient lake that contained thousands of the world's weirdest armoured fish from the 'Age of Fishes'. At least six new species have been discovered on the hundreds of sandstone slabs that are completely covered with fossil fish. These include ancient lungfish, cousins of the first air-breathing land-dwellers, and armoured fish like Groenlandaspis that have also been found in fossil deposits in Greenland as well as the ice-scoured rocks of Antarctica.

It is the only museum and research facility in the Southern Hemisphere to provide spectacular displays of fossil fish and one of the best fossil fish museum in the world. It will provide displays of fish of all ages including awesome 10 metre ancestors of Great White Sharks and armoured placoderins the size and ferocity of killer whales. Living lungfish will be on display in enormous ground-level tanks. Excavation scenes will be reconstructed, as will the prehistoric environments that once teemed with the breath-taking variety of very strange fish that will soon be made famous by Canowindra.

The first stage of the Museum is near completion with the building in place and the exhibition program under way. Capital funds are still required to complete Stage 2 which will incorporate a learning and study centre for students within and beyond the region.

Future possibilities

While centres identified above that are under construction or in advanced stages of planning are the core of the Fossil Trail, they will provide further opportunities for development of other compatible centres that could, in later years, be added to this Trail.

An example is the Cuddie Springs Museum currently under discussion. This site, near Brewarrina NSW, is characterised not only by vast thicknesses of skeletons of giant Pleistocene marsupials including Diprotodon and the last of the giant extinct 'Thunder Birds', but also by clear evidence of the presence and involvement of early indigenous peoples including undoubted artefacts intermingled among the bones. It is also the site of discovery of the world's oldest evidence for stone-milling of grains. For this reason, this site alone in Australia may hold the clue to the highly controversial question of why the giant Megafaunal creatures of Australia died out-was it climate change or the activities of early humans? Cuddie Springs holds the answers.

Visitors here would see excavations in progress, talk to archaeologists and palaeontologists and, where possible, could beconic involved in aspects of the excavation process.

Additional regional benefits of developing the 'Fossil Trail'

In almost all cases, these regional and rural initiatives provide opportunities for the Australian Museum and other Government organisations to deploy relevant components of their CBD collections into rural and regional areas. For example, discussions are now underway with the Wellington Shire about the AM's commitment to positioning a significant part of its historical Wellington fossil collection in the anticipated on-site Wellington Caves Museum.

By keeping the focus of each component of the 'Fossil Trail' complementary, international and national tourists will be encouraged to explore the whole of the Trail, stopping along the way in all of the regional centres, rather than staying in just one place.

That said, all of the centres established as part of the 'Fossil Trail' will also act as nuclei that will attract, preserve and display additional local cultural and natural history collections that reflect individual distinctions of the particular regions.

All of the sites noted above should also provide opportunities for close cooperation and participation of local Indigenous groups, in some cases as interpretive officers and in others as researchers and archivists of associated 'keeping places'.