Australian Fossil Mammal Sites

Most visitors to this site only visit the Naracoorte site, which is at the southern end of Australia with the Riversleigh Site up in North. I visited the Naracoorte site in Oct 2021 with my wife. Visiting Naracoorte was an easy visit via hire car with a number of caves and sites to visit which was quite interesting. The Riversleigh site is a lot more out of the way and very much less awe inspiring. If you only wish to visit one of the sites to tick this UNESCO site off, I suggest Naracoorte. Riversleigh though was a nice adventure for myself and my son in April 2022 and it provided us an opportunity to visit a lesser travelled area and region. The site itself lacks a lot of visitor information and consists of a small walk around the fossil site area.      

I visited this WHS in January 2018, focusing on South Australia's only WHS - Naracoorte Caves National Park. I had prebooked online (32 dollars) to secure a place for the Victoria Fossil Cave guided tour at 14:15 (it takes roughly 1 hr). If there are any palaeontologist geeks who would like to invest more time (and money!) there's also a WH tour to Victoria Fossil Cave and Blanche Cave to also visit research areas not usually seen by the general public.

After a long drive from the Great Ocean Road (at least you 'gain' 45 minutes if driving from the state of Victoria), we parked at the Wonambi Fossil Centre. Here we collected our tickets, and got a brief visual introduction of some fossils and how the megafauna must have looked like by doing the self-guided walk through a simulated forest and swampland geared mostly at entertaining children. There are several information boards displaying inscription on the WH list just next to the entrance and the only cafe and toilet facilities available around. We drove again to the Victoria Fossil Cave (some 2-3km away) to meet our guide. Even though the number of people visiting the cave at any one time is capped to 25, it felt a bit too crowded at times. The temperature inside the cave is a constant 17 degrees Celsius so it's not too bad and a welcome change from the outside heat.

Apart from a few rather ordinary cave features, the highlight of the cave …

Similar to most of reviewers, I only visited Naracoorte component of this World Heritage Site as part of my Great Ocean Road trip from Melbourne to Adelaide. I chose Penola, a lovely small town with fine food and nice red wine of the well-known vineyards of Coonawara as my base to visit this fossil caves national park. Before the visit it is highly recommended to check the website of the national park for tour schedule and buy the limited ticket, I saw many tourists came without this preparation and found no tour available. I arrived the tourist center 1 hour before my booked tour to register. The biggest attraction on the ground level is the big, cute statue of Diprotodon, an ancestor of wombat and Koala bear.

From the tourist center, I had to drive to the entrance of Victoria Cave and wait for the ranger with the less of almost 30 tourists. The tour could easily divide into 2 parts, the normal cave tour with lovely stalactites and stalagmites, and the fossil bed tour. I was quite surprised to see that actually the cave was quite beautiful, better than my original idea. Maybe originally the caves have pretty low ceiling so the formation of dripstones here are easier. It was quite fascinating to see how much earth they had to dig out in order to make passageway for tourists without crawling the low ceiling. Too bad that the quality of dripstone could not compare with other famous World …

This year I visited the Northern part of this WHS : Riversleigh, Qld. The site is scattered over a large area, but section D is where some important finds have been made.

The finds however are not here, but have removed for study and processing to the Outback on Isa Museum in Mount Isa. They are readily accessible in the Riversleigh section, soaking in acid to remove some of the encasing limestone. This work is only in its infancy, and much is left to be discovered.

Some of the Premier Stateliner buses travelling between Adelaide and Mount Gambier stop at the township of Naracoorte. Others travel along the coast. The caves are some 14 kms distant from the township, but I managed to enlist the assistance of the Visitor Information office to arrange transport.

My visit coincided with tours of the Alexandra Cave, as well as the Wonambi cave full of mock-ups of prehistoric animals based on the skeletons found at the site.

When driving from Southern Australia's capital Adelaide direction the Great Ocean Road, the Naracoorte Caves are only a small detour, but surely worth the gazoline.It puts you back into times half a million years ago;you can visit the various caves on guided tours that leave on certain times during the day.Its all on their website.We opted for the Victoria Fossil Cave and were not disappointed.Not only were there beautiful rock formations, stalacmites etc., but our guide/palaeontologist was very knowledgeable.

We were told that inside the caves tens of thousand of specimens representing about 93 vertebrate animals have been collected.Ranging from the Tasmanian Devil to wallabies, extinct mammals and even turtles.

Most of them fell down into holes of the cave's ceilings and could not escape.It is Australia's largest fossil deposit in terms of volume in a single site.

I visited the southern half of this serial nomination: Naracoorte Caves. It is located 10km south of the town of Naracoorte, some 5 hours drive from Melbourne. Quite a remote location – but it does see its fair share of visitors. There were about 40 other cars in the parking lot when I arrived there on a weekday afternoon. Be aware: the caves are located in the state of South Australia, which has a half an hour time difference from eastern states like Victoria (it’s half an hour earlier here than in Melbourne).

Visits to the most interesting caves are guided tours only. They conduct several of them during the day. Most popular is the Bat tour, where you can watch the large bat population. However, I had arrived just in time to join the Fossil tour. This takes you into Victoria Fossil Cave, the one cave that has earned Naracoorte its WH status.

This Cave is 1.5 km away from the Visitor Centre. It’s a limestone cave about 500,000 years old. It has a variety of dripstone features, and it holds the first fossil bed found at Naracoorte. Later on, they discovered more of them, in other caves too. The animals got trapped here after they had fallen through holes in the surface. The fossil bed is as big as an Olympic swimming pool. It still has a lot of bones in it. The skeletons of two of the most impressive species found here have been put …