Australian fuzzy dragon new species: researchers taipeitimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from taipeitimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Academic insights reached millions
The story that garnered the most interest from our audience in April was this piece on why new COVID variants necessitate a global ‘maximum suppression’ strategy. It has been read more than 1.1 million times!
It was also republished by more than 28 other media outlets around the world -
including The Guardian, ABC and the South China Morning Post. 84% of its readers were from countries outside Australia.
The second most-read piece was Ritesh Chugh from CQUniversity’s piece on how to deal with water damage to your phone, which received more than 570,000 reads. Ritesh said:
“As an academic, such a wide readership provides great testimony of our public scholarship”
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.
Date Time
New Australian fossil lizard unearthed
A remote expedition to a large salt lake in South Australia has unearthed the fossils of a tiny new species of skink, pronounced Australia’s oldest at 25 million years old.
Researchers from The University of Western Australia, Flinders University and the South Australian Museum made the discovery in 2017 at a rich fossil site, seven hours drive north of Adelaide.
The new species, an ancestor of the bluetongue lizard, was unveiled today in Royal Society’s Open Scienceand officially named Proegernia mikebulli in honour of the late Flinders University lizard researcher Professor Mike Bull.
Named Mike, or
M
ikebulli, in honour of Flinders University lizard researcher Professor Mike Bull, the tiny skink is 25-million-years-old, making it the continent s oldest skink.
Professor Bull passed away in 2016, but not before inspiring generations of reptile scientists. Our colleague Professor Bull s long-term ecological studies of sleepy lizards were a massive contribution to biology, said Professor Mike Lee from Flinders University. The fossil record is essentially data from a long-term natural ecological study, so it s fitting that this fossil lizard is named in honour of Mike.
Palaeontologists and volunteers from Flinders University and the South Australian Museum focused on parts on the lake, seven hours drive north of Adelaide, where other fossils were previously unearthed. The area was once lush and green and is considered the continent s unique fauna cradle, particularly for its reptile diversity.