ABSTRACT
In the early days of Australia the landscape must have seemed as alien to the British and European colonists as the landscapes of Mars and Venus do to us today. Such harshness of view, such strange and rough plants and animals, such monstrous swings in climate. Modern observation and ancient fossil also combined to good effect at another classic site, Lake Calabonna in South Australia. Thousands of giant marsupials and birds were there, bones not jumbled up together as at Cuddie Springs, but in the form of complete whole skeletons. But the religious climate was also important, of course, and the mid-nineteenth century was a great battleground between science and religion, in Australia as elsewhere. The extinction of the dinosaurs may have been a catastrophic event almost beyond human imagination,24 a small dot of light in the sky becoming larger and larger until it almost filled the sky and then struck the earth with a massive explosion.
