Golden Spike for the Flinders Ranges

Great discoveries are usually a combination of serendipity, excellent observation and hard work. All of the above contributed to Reg Sprigg’s discovery of a field of fossils of unknown origin above the eastern shore of Lake Torrens in 1946.

The fossils were later identified as the oldest complex animals ever found on earth. Reg’s discovery challenged conventional wisdom, pushing back the dawn of multi-cellular life some 70 million years earlier. In his book GEOLOGY IS FUN Reg Sprigg wrote “The fossil group certainly now justifies its own completely new age —’the Ediacarian Era’ or ‘Age of Worms and Jellyfishes’”.

In April 2005, the international Geological Time Scale was amended. A site in the Flinders Ranges National Park was selected by the International Palaeontological Congress, as the world reference locality or ‘Golden Spike’, for the new Ediacaran Period. Always the visionary, Reg would be smiling today after struggling for more than two years as a young government geologist, to interest the scientific community in his 1946 fossil finds at Ediacara.

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