Between Dinosaur Salads and the Ice Ages: the difficulties of studying the Paleogene and Neogene in Queensland

Speaker:  Dr Jennifer Cooling, The School of Earth & Environmental Sciences, UQ

Abstract:  Our ability to understand how the characteristic modern flora of Australia arose from the Mesozoic flora of Gondwana has been severely hampered in Queensland, and the northern half of the continent in general, by an inability to reliably and accurately date and correlate terrestrial sediments of the Paleogene and Neogene. The biostratigraphic zonation of the south-east Australian Gippsland Basin which has been invaluable to workers in the southern half of the continent has proven to be less applicable to Queensland sediments. In the absence of a more localised alternative, it has so far proven impossible to reliably assemble the numerous individual pieces of evidence from the period into a cohesive narrative. The lack of a current equivalent biozonation for Queensland does not however mean one could not be created with dedicated study, and there are several promising avenues of study that could significantly contribute towards the development of such.

Bio:  Jennifer Cooling is a postdoctoral researcher at the UQ School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, working as part of the palynological/deep time research group. After completing a PhD on the palynology of the Jurassic-Cretaceous transition in the Surat Basin, she has been lured up into relatively more recent paleoenvironmental work on the ‘Tertiary’ of Queensland and now on the last few thousand years of the south-west of Tasmania.