The Triassic insects of Denmark Hill, Ipswich, Southeast Queensland: the creation, use and dispersal of a collection

Type and additional fossil insects from the Late Triassic Denmark Hill locality in Southeast Queensland, Australia, are held in the collections of the Queensland Museum (Brisbane), the Australian Museum (Sydney) and the Natural History Museum of the United Kingdom (London). The history of these collections shows that they were the product of a concerted effort in the first two decades of the twentieth century to extract the fossils by Benjamin Dunstan, Queensland’s Chief Government Geologist, and to describe the fossils by Dunstan and Robin Tillyard, the foremost Australian entomologist of the time. They collaborated closely to document the late Triassic insects of Australia, at the same time as Dunstan carefully curated and organised both the official government collection of these insects for the Geological Survey of Queensland, and his own private collection. The death of the two men in the 1930s led to the sale by his widow of Dunstan’s private fossil collection (including type and type counterpart specimens) to the British Museum, and the donation of Tillyard’s by his widow to the same institution, in addition to some material that went to the Australian Museum. This paper documents the locations of all of the published specimens. The history of the Denmark Hill fossils (a site no longer accessible for collection) highlights the problems for researchers of the dispersal of holdings such as these, and in particular the separation of the part and counterpart of the same insect fossils. It also raises ethical questions arising from the ownership and disposal of private holdings of important fossil material collected in an official capacity.

The vertebrate fossil collection record from the Chinchilla Sand, South–East Queensland, 1844-2021

Since the mid-1840s a diverse fossil vertebrate assemblage, referred to as the Chinchilla Local Fauna, has been collected from the Pliocene deposits of the Chinchilla Sand on the western Darling Downs of South-East Queensland. In large part because of this long history and the numerous collectors who have worked fossil deposits in the area, much ambiguity regarding site and locality names and their specific coordinates exists. Here, we review the vertebrate fossil collection records in the Queensland Museum Fossil, Donor, Collector and Locality Registers, correspondence, and field notes in an effort to pinpoint the location of each named locality and site and develop a digital map which highlights the historical collecting sites at one significant locality in the Chinchilla area. To ensure that a systematic framework for all future collecting from the main collecting area (Chinchilla Rifle Range) is maintained, we recommend the use of consistent nomenclature for sites so that spatial information of the highest possible quality is captured into the future. We recommend future collections include detailed recordings of stratigraphic contexts as well as GPS coordinates.

A new carnivorous sponge (Porifera) from the Coral Sea

A new species of carnivorous sponge, Lycopodina coralseaensis sp. nov., family Cladorhizidae, is described from the Louisiade Plateau, Coral Sea, off the east coast of Australia at bathyal depths of ~2000 m, collected during the RV Investigator 2019 voyage. The new species differs from other Lycopodina with stipitate morphology by lacking forceps microscleres, similar to L. nikitawimandi Ekins et al., 2020a but differing in having only a very small single size class of palmate anisochelae, and most importantly by having a third category of mycalostyle echinating the stem and basal holdfast. This new species is the sixth Lycopodina recently described as new from the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone (L. nikitawimandi, L. helios, L. cassida, L. brochidodroma and L. hystrix), bringing the total number of carnivorous sponges known so far from Australia to 26.