About
About this collection
Every fossil here was collected and photographed in New South Wales by Richard Jones. There are 63 specimens from three periods: 46 from the Late Silurian of the Yass district, 4 from the Early Carboniferous of the Rouchel Brook district, and 13 from the Permian of the Sydney Basin.
How to read an identification
Fossil names are given as precisely as the material honestly allows, and no further. Palaeontologists use a small set of conventions for this, and they are used here too:
- Proetus sp.
- The genus is accepted; the species has not been determined.
- Rugosa, gen. indet.
- The specimen cannot be identified below the rank given — here, the order. Solitary corals usually need a cut section to go further.
- Spinella cf. S. yassensis
- The specimen closely resembles that species, but the identification is not confirmed.
Genus and species names are printed in italics. Names above genus are not. That is not decoration: it is how the ranks are told apart at a glance.
What these identifications are worth
These are a collector's determinations, made from external features, and none has been checked against type material or by a specialist. They should be read as careful attributions rather than as formal records. Where a name looked inconsistent with the age of the rock it came from — as two of the corals did — the name has been dropped in favour of a higher rank, and the reason is stated on the specimen's own page.
None of these specimens is registered in a museum collection, so none can be cited in scientific literature. The value of the collection is as a regional reference: it shows what can be found, and what it looks like when found.
Ages
Ages are those of the rock unit the fossil came from, not the global range of the genus, and follow the International Chronostratigraphic Chart. Where the collector did not record the formation, the entry says so rather than guessing.
Collecting
Much of the Illawarra coastline and escarpment lies within national parks and reserves where fossil collecting is restricted or prohibited. Fossils on private land belong to the landholder. Anyone following these localities should check what applies before picking anything up, and is generally better off photographing a specimen in place than removing it.