What did South Eastern Australia look like 130 million years ago? This watercolour landscape is part of my on going work recontructing fossils discovered last summer in Boola Boola Forest, Gippsland Victoria. They date back to the Early Cretaceous period - the golden age of the dinosaurs.
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On our dig we found fossils of every species shown in this illustration. The plants in the foreground and fossil shown here is Otozamites douglasii, a member of the cycad-like Bennettitales which are completely extinct now. However the rest of the scene depicts plants that have similar modern decendants: Cladophlebis ferns down low, a forest of conifers including Bellarinea richardsii (Podocarp family), and very tall Brachphyllum tyersensis (Belonging to either the Araucaria or Cypress family).