Fossils, ferals and the longest train ever

Feral food - eat some today

Camel, kangaroo, emu and goat - delicious! We stopped for a pub lunch at the Prairie Hotel and had their 'feral mixed grill' and 'red curry goat'.

Just before, a train went past the pub on its way to Leigh Creek to pick up coal. Susie counted 153 coal cars being pulled by 4 locos. The train took at least 5 minutes to pass. At one point, you couldn't see its front or its end. Everyone ran over to watch it, including a guy wearing an Akubra and carrying a takeaway coffee, and the train honked. We all waved madly.

Fossil from Ediacara

Also at the pub were a stack of fossils from the Ediacara Hills, about 50km away. Ediacaran fossils starred with David Attenborough in his series 'First Life'. The fossils are of soft bodied jellyfish and marine worms from the pre-Cambrian period, about 580 million years ago.

Also on a fossil theme, yesterday we drove the Brachina Gorge Geological Trail where we saw even older fossils. They were fossils of stromatolites from 640 million years ago - some of the earliest life forms. Stromatolites are layers of blue-green algae. We could see the layers in the fossils. On the 20km trail, we drove through 130 million years of earth history. The Flinders Ranges are some seriously ancient mountains.