Melbourne Museum’s newest exhibition showcases remarkable fossils, models, rocks and minerals, stunning animatronics and living displays, taking visitors on an extraordinary journey through 600 million years of Victoria’s life and landscapes.
600 million years: Victoria evolves opens on 1st July 2010 and is the latest addition to the Museum’s ever-popular Science and Life Gallery.
The exhibition tells the story of Victoria’s evolution – of land, geology and species – beginning hundreds of millions of years ago when Australia was part of a super-continent. At this time, the land that was to become Victoria was under the ocean, with a coastline near where the Flinders Ranges are today.
Through a series of displays featuring prehistoric landscapes and life forms, 600 million years shows how evolution shaped Victoria as we know it today.
“This is a really fantastic exhibition that vividly tells the story of Victoria’s ever-changing landscapes, animals and plants,” said Wayne Gerdtz, Curator. “Each display in the exhibition is like a snapshot of a pivotal stage in the evolution of animals and plants and the land itself.”
“A particular highlight of 600 million years is a display of animatronic dinosaurs showing a kind of animal that roamed Victoria around 115 million years ago: a pair of Qantassaurus based on actual fossils found at Inverloch. Developed by leading animatronic creators Creature Technology Company in collaboration with Museum Victoria, the models incorporate cutting-edge technology and computer animated backdrops to create a realistic environment.”
“The dinosaurs are programmed to react with visitors – they are so lifelike, it’s creepily realistic,” said Gerdtz.
600 million years starts by immersing visitors under the seas of more than 500 million years ago, with fossils and models of some bizarre-looking, long-extinct animals. Around this time, the oldest Victorian rocks formed, as a result of underwater volcanic eruptions – rocks originally formed by these volcanoes have been found at Phillip Island by Museum Victoria geologists.
The exhibition explains the processes that formed iconic Victorian landscapes like the Grampians – which formed as sandstone in ancient ocean beds – and the Dandenong Ranges – formed from the remains of vast cauldron-like volcanoes. Visitors will also be taken through key stages in the evolution of life in Victoria from ancient reefs and their inhabitants, to the invasion of the land by plants, invertebrates, and eventually backboned animals.
Fossils are a strong feature throughout 600 million years, including Janjucetus (an early ancestor of modern baleen whales identified by Museum Victoria researcher Dr Erich Fitzgerald in 2006), exquisitely preserved leaves and even fossilised fruit and nuts from more than 40 million years ago when the Victorian landscape was blanketed in lush tropical rainforest.
Other notable objects include casts of internationally significant fossilised footprints discovered near Victoria’s Genoa River, left behind by one of the first vertebrates to walk, around 365 million years ago. Visitors can follow the story of these ancient amphibious tetrapods, and their eventual evolution into reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and mammals.
600 million years also includes a number of ‘living fossils’ – such as live Queensland Lungfish, found in river systems in south-eastern Queensland – animals that have changed little in more than 200 million years. The Lungfish display represents a fish closely related to the first backboned animals to walk on land.
600 million years: Victoria evolves is the third phase of the redevelopment of Melbourne Museum’s Science and Life Gallery. The completed redevelopment will present the most comprehensive natural history display in any Australian museum, and will feature more than 3,000 objects from the museum’s collections, many displayed for the first time.