Some of Australia’s most famous animals — wombat, platypus, kangaroos and the extinct marsupial tiger thylacine — have been traced back to their fossil ancestors in remarkable finds in central South Australia. Now a remote expedition to a large inland salt lake in 2017 has sifted through remains unearthed in Namba Formation deposits to describe a tiny new skink, an ancestor of Australia’s well-known bluetongue lizards.

Now a remote expedition to a large inland salt lake in 2017 has sifted through remains unearthed in Namba Formation deposits to describe a tiny new skink, an ancestor of Australia’s well-known bluetongue lizards — to be named in honour of world-renown Flinders University lizard researcher Professor Mike Bull.

The new species, unveiled in the Royal Society’s Open Science today, is described as Australia’s oldest — a 25 million-year-old skink named Proegernia mikebulli after the late Flinders University Professor Mike Bull.

It was found by Flinders University and South Australian Museum palaeontologists and volunteers at a rich fossil site on Lake Pinpa located on the 602,000 square hectare Frome Downs Station, seven hours drive north of capital city Adelaide.

Following the crusted shoreline of a salt lake, the team homed in on a cross section of sediments where fossil excavations of ancestors of koala, a predatory bird, and fragments of a thylacine were previously unearthed. Remains of prehistoric fish, platypus, dolphins and crocodilians have also been found nearby.

«It was 45?C in the shade that day and hard work digging through the clay, but it was definitely worth it once the tiniest of bone fragments turned out to be those of the oldest Australian skink,» says lead author palaeo-herpetologist Dr Kailah Thorn, who conducted the research at Flinders University as part of her PhD.

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