Queensland Museum Palaeontology

How fauna groups responded to climatic and other environmental stresses is important to the determination of their conservation status. Fossil collections enable new knowledge of Queenslandâ??s recent and extinct biota and its geoheritage. They allow us trace the evolution of many modern animal groups through the last 500 million years, and help us track the history of climatic and other natural environmental changes in tropical Australasia.
Our collection is primarily from Queensland provinces, but there is also a substantial collection of comparative material from adjacent Indo-Pacific regions. It is an amalgamation of previously dispersed collections (the Queensland Museum, the Geological Survey of Queensland and the University of Queensland) and is now amongst the largest and most significant in the southern hemisphere.

Collections dating back to the 1870s are:
* invertebrate and plant fossils from Queensland, particularly in early to middle Palaeozoic times; corals, trilobites, Palaeozoic brachiopods and molluscs, Triassic insects, Cretaceous faunas, echinoderms of all ages, microspores and pollen;
* Australiaâ??s most significant vertebrate fossil collection; Mesozoic reptiles, with Australiaâ??s largest dinosaur collection (including Muttaburrasaurus), largest marine reptile collection (including Kronosaurus), Tertiary and Quaternary mammals and other vertebrates;
* material from the Riversleigh World Heritage site of approximately 16,000 specimens, including 2,500 types.