In April, Harriet Drage from the Anom Lab joined the team from the South Australian Museum, Adelaide, Australia, for their field season at the Emu Bay Shale Konservat-Lagerstätte on Kangaroo Island. This is one of the most significant early Cambrian (~514 million years ago) fossil localities in the world, which preserves soft tissue and rare species but also a high diversity and abundance of invertebrate fossils. The crew spent 9 days splitting rocks in a private quarry, collecting important material to expand the Museum’s research collections.
Harriet works on the trilobites from the Emu Bay Shale, in particular looking at their exoskeleton moulting behaviour. She managed to collect data from over 200 trilobite individuals in the field, and the same again from the amazing collections at the South Australian Museum. For most of the time temperatures in the quarry soared to over 35 degrees, but despite the heat they had a fun and profitable trip!
Harriet’s field work was funded by a research grant from the King’s College London Menzies Centre for Australian Studies.
