Australia or Eastern Gondwana, a Discovery That Challenges Long-held Beliefs About the Plants' Origins and Has Led to the Naming of a New

Queensland Museum principal geoscience scientist Andrew Rozefelds said researchers were initially stumped by the exceptionally preserved specimens. "It was an unusual discovery because when we first found it, it looked a bit like lizard skin," he said. "I just went, 'It can't be', because when you get plants, you don't tend to get vertebrates as well.

We were faced with a plant we've never seen before. Earlier this month, Dr Rozefelds and colleagues published a paper in the International Journal of Plant Sciences challenging previous assumptions about how the plants arrived in Australia. "The most recent molecular data suggested that this family of plants migrated into Australia from South-East Asia, he said.

"The fossil evidence we've got would suggest this isn't the case. The research found the plants were already in Australia about 30 million years ago, suggesting Gondwanan origins." "These fossils show that members of the Melastomataceae were growing in Australia tens of millions of years before the continent made contact with South-East Asia, Dr Rozefelds said. Gondwana began breaking up about 180 million years ago into continents including Australia, South America, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, India and Antarctica.

University of Queensland co-author Anita Milroy said the fossils were found in silcretes, an extremely hard rock, near Capella on brigalow farming country. "Around 30 million years ago, it would have been a rainforest … and there are some living relatives [of the plants] now in the Daintree [near Cairns], she said. Dr Milroy contributed by using synchrotron imaging, a high-intensity X-ray technique, on the specimens.

"Now it's a technique that's used right across the board in paleobotany," she said. "We can actually see inside these fruits, we don't have to destroy them. The research also describes the first whole fruit of the Melastomataceae family found anywhere in the world.

Dr Milroy said the Capella area was "internationally significant" because historical volcanic eruptions helped preserve the fossils. University of Melbourne palaeontologist Vera Korasidis, who was not involved in the study, agreed further studies should be undertaken in the area. "Unlike in bones or teeth that we associate with dinosaurs, which are naturally quite hard, soft tissues that we associate with plants tend to rapidly deform or decay before fossilisation occurs. She described the find as "exceptional": It's quite exciting to be able to rewrite the narrative and say that perhaps they evolved or were present in north-east Queensland, and then spread northward, as opposed to the other way around.