Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind. Richard Fortey
still there was a time when continents were dispersed once more, making for a geography that looks still odder to our eyes. Science tries to reconstruct this former world map: it is like cutting a jigsaw puzzle into a set of new pieces, and then attempting to refit them into another picture altogether. By the Cambrian Period some 500 million years ago, these scattered continents were naked with their rocks unclothed by plants. The distant relatives of the velvet worm were there, though, living beneath the sea among a host of other creatures: some strange, some familiar. The lobopods were more diverse then than they have ever been since.* The branches of the tree of life were drawing closer to a relatively few common major limbs, but there was still a great variety of crawling, swimming, floating, burrowing creatures. There were livings to be earned: prey to hunt, hideaways to construct, plankton to be filtered, mates to be found. But then we must go back further, still further, into the Ediacaran. The surf at Mistaken Point washes over an even earlier, but alien world, a vanished world of soft-bodied, fractal things. There may have been no predation then, no burrowing, no grazing, no evidence of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. It was a different biosphere, and its mysteries still elude us. And the fossils of Mistaken Point prove that not everything survived.
The search for the velvet worm leads to unsuspected places and puzzling worlds.
3
Slimy Mounds
Shark Bay is a long way from anywhere. In Australia, distance soon acquires its own curious rules. Within the suburban strip that lines favoured parts of the coast there are traffic jams and shopping malls like anywhere else, but away from civilisation the outback country stretches onwards forever. Far from the mountainous east, much of the country is flat. No doubt connoisseurs of the horizontal find infinite entertainment in its small variations, but for me a bemused puzzlement sets in after a few hours apparently rehearsing the same piece of landscape numerous times. Time begins to stretch in odd ways. After a snooze, I wake up unsure whether I have been asleep for ten minutes or two hours. Small eucalypts line wandering creeks while sand dunes are covered with scrub, occasional scruffy fences mark obscure ownership, and there are groves of taller gums or isolated she-oaks stocked with the noisy parrots known as galahs. Then the sequence repeats, but not necessarily in the same order. The landscape is utterly distinctive, like that of nowhere else in the world, with a stark beauty under a clear pale blue sky, but it is also relentlessly repetitive. Anyone foolish enough to leave the marked track will find it is easy to get lost. Bush stories are full of sticky ends and grieving widows. I know that maps do not really work in a landscape that repeats like an old tune whistled over and over.
Route 1, running up the west coast of Western Australia towards Shark Bay, seems never to end. The Greyhound bus runs onwards through the dark, with nothing really distinguishing the passage of miles except sporadically a startled kangaroo picked out in the headlights. Occasional vehicles pass the other way, and each one seems something of a surprise. What can they be doing out here? I have to remind myself yet again that I am en route to see one of the holy relics in geology; it will be worth the effort. After countless hours, the Overlander Roadhouse welcomes me – a neon-lit marker set down in the endless landscape; a gas station, with a rudimentary restaurant, a place to loaf about until the next bus arrives. Aboriginal people wait there desultorily for relatives who have been off to Perth or somewhere to make a few dollars. Flies buzz about, with irritating persistence; there must be something else for them to do than endlessly return to drink from the same sweaty brow, or so one would think, but round and round they go. Backpackers loiter, waiting to embark on the next section of an adventure planned in theory, but now measured out in sweat and flies. It is a kind of end-of-the-world place, on nobody’s list of ‘must-sees’, but an essential stopping point before negotiating the wilderness. This is a place where timetables mean something to somebody, a place where I can get the next bus to see the stromatolites. Not far from the Overlander Roadhouse is a place that tells us of the transformation of the very air we breathe, a window opening into remote Precambrian times.
Though the outback may look pristine, in this part of Australia the wildlife has been transformed by human introductions. Feral goats have degraded the natural bush, and cats have culled the nocturnal mammals that were once numerous. The big-eared marsupial bilby, with its back legs like a miniature kangaroo and improbably long tail, is such a charming animal that it has become a kind of mascot for the conservation movement hereabouts. It would indeed be tragic if its only permanent memorial were in one of those perfectly photographed wildlife television programmes. Conservationists in Australia have taken to referring to the ‘Easter bilby’ rather than the ‘Easter bunny’ (bunnies being voracious introductions, too). It is already too late for many small marsupials in the eastern states of the country; their only record now being watercolour drawings made by the early naturalists. These harmless creatures could not outwit intelligent feline and canine hunters, and they failed to survive. Australia is full of poignant paradoxes. This land has many ancient biological survivors yet it is also, much like New Zealand, a place where the extinction of species is still in progress. This is despite the efforts of a generation of Australians many of whom treasure their unique fauna and flora. Almost every town boasts dedicated people concerned with ‘bush regeneration’, and in Western Australia new species of beautiful indigenous plants are still being discovered regularly, even around Perth. It is a very biodiverse region, despite the challenges of the climate, and not yet fully known. While I was there Tropical Cyclone Hubert turned the sky black, and sections of the main road were closed. The species that live in this tough land must be natural survivors to be able to negotiate fluctuations between flood and swelter. That description, of course, also includes feral cats.
Shark Bay is a huge and ragged bite into the profile of the west coast of Australia. It has now become a World Heritage Area, which brings more money and more tourism. Much of the former, and nearly all of the latter, is directed to the beach resort of Monkey Mia where ‘swimming with dolphins’ is on offer. When I flew over the Bay and its clear waters in a light plane, I saw an undulating submarine prairie of sea grass, dark emerald green, broken into banks like meadows. A tenth of the world’s dugongs – 250 kilograms of peaceable herbivorous sea mammal – graze in leisurely fashion upon this luscious expanse, many living to seventy years or more. Juicy fishes doubtless account for the name of the Bay, since they attract fourteen species of sharks, including species like the tiger shark that command respect. From the air I saw how Shark Bay is divided into two large lobes by a median peninsula; the aboriginal name for the Bay is ‘cartharrgudu’ (‘two bays’). The top of the peninsula is now the Francois Peron National Park and a serious attempt is being made to clear this sandy area of feral goats and predators for the benefit of the native fauna and flora. Dirk Hartog Island provides an outer barrier to the Bay, which protects the coast from storms cutting across the Indian Ocean. I never knew before visiting Western Australia that this island was the first landfall for any European. The Dutchman, Dirk Hartog, landed here on 25 October 1616, beating Captain Cook to it by 152 years, and leaving a pewter plate nailed to a post as evidence. That plate is still preserved in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. William Dampier, ‘the buccaneer explorer’, spent a week there in 1699 and gave the Bay the name we use today. The aboriginal fishermen were plying their trade at the time, but there is little evidence of them now. I conclude that it is not only small and shy marsupials that failed to survive.
My quest is for something altogether more recherché than shark or dugong. At the tip of the eastern bay the edge of the sea provides a prospect of life two billion years ago … I am travelling incredibly far back in time. The journey to the old telegraph station at Hamelin Pool takes me through undulating, intensely green scrub interspersed with a few mallee trees, interrupted only occasionally by flat-bottomed depressions carrying scrappy salt-scrub and patches of white gypsum – the aboriginal inhabitants called these clay-pans birridas. I missed the flowering season, and now all the bushes seem to bear black nuts. Next come low dunes made up of startlingly white tiny shells. I crunch my way across the dunes, and beyond lies a very shallow arm of the sea. This is where the stromatolites