Riversleigh and Naracoorte Fossil Sites

The Australian Fossil Mammal Sites, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1994, are a serial property made up of two localities some 2,000 kilometres apart: Riversleigh, in north-western Queensland, and Naracoorte, in south-eastern South Australia. Together they offer the most complete record of the evolution of Australia's mammal fauna.

Riversleigh is a group of limestone deposits formed in caves and freshwater pools between some 25 and 12 million years ago, when the region was rainforest and not today's dry savannah. Its fossils document the moment when the Australian marsupial lineages diversified, and have yielded extraordinary species such as marsupial lions, tree kangaroos and dozens of bats, many of them described for the first time from this site.

Naracoorte, by contrast, belongs to the Pleistocene, the last 500,000 years. Its caves acted as natural traps: animals fell down the shafts and were buried, producing accumulations of complete and exceptionally preserved skeletons. There lie the remains of Australia's vanished megafauna, with giant kangaroos, wombats the size of a rhinoceros and the marsupial lion Thylacoleo, and the site is central to the scientific debate on the causes of their extinction, between climate change and human arrival on the continent.