From Vincent Serventy
The article by Bennett Daviss referring to Ediacaran fossils
(“Cast out of Eden, 16 May, p 26)
brought back memories of their discoverer Reg Sprigg. One
fine day in 1946 he flew me in a light plane to a rocky hill slope on the
western slopes of the Flinders Ranges.
He told me how as a student, his revered professor Douglas Mawson had told
him how it was possible the world’s earliest fossils might be found in those
unchanged sandstones.
We walked along until Sprigg picked up a piece of rock. “What do you think
that is?” he asked me. “Certainly a fossil,” was my reply.
It took Sprigg years to convince his fellow geologists it was a fossil, later
to be named Mawsonia spriggi in honour of both teacher and student,
though even the teacher dismissed it as merely a “fortuitous quirk of nature”.
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Sprigg told me it was only through the visit of two Russian geologists to an
Adelaide conference that this incredible fossil series was made known to
science.
Sprigg worked hard to have the slope—over which I walked to pick up my
own specimen of Mawsonia—declared a geological reserve, saving it
from casual “picker uppers” like myself.
Pearl Beach, New South Wales
