Evolution and Extinction in a Super-continental World

Name: Evolution and Extinction in a Super-continental World
Start: 2025-06-05T19:00:00+09:30
Location: Mawson Lecture Theatre

Schedule

Thu, 05 Jun, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC+09:30

Location

Mawson Lecture Theatre | Adelaide, SA

The Field Geology Club of South Australia presents
The 34th Brian Daily Memorial Lecture
Dr. Phil Plummer
Earth Sciences, University of Adelaide
The traditional view of metazoan (animal) evolution currently favours its initiation about 580 million years ago, just before the start of the Cambrian Period, with the trigger possibly being a moderately extensive glacial event. Evolution is then assumed to have progressed essentially as a continuum, albeit punctuated with (and surviving) a handful of severe mass extinction events. A growing body of fossil evidence, however, is challenging this view, both in the timing of its initiation (pushing the start date back by at least 270 million years) and replacing the apparent “continuum” with an early series of evolution-then-extinction cycles. This talk will illustrate some of the recent fossil discoveries from the Fleurieu Peninsula south of Adelaide, the Flinders Ranges, the Amadeus Basin southwest of Alice Springs, and central India before exploring the timing and evolutionary significance of these discoveries in the light of the global continental arrangement.
Completed university education at Adelaide University, emerging with a PhD on Flinders Ranges stratigraphy/sedimentology in 1978. After a brief sojourn studying the Cryogenian diamictites in the Lesser Himalayas, joined Shell International and embarked on a 36-year career in the petroleum industry. Explored for oil and gas for Shell throughout the 1980s in Holland, Oman, Tanzania, Gabon, Australia and New Zealand before spending the 1990s in Seychelles promoting the offshore oil potential internationally for the Government. In 2000 joined Santos in Adelaide, primarily exploring for hydrocarbons in the Cooper/Eromanga Basin before being assigned to determine the petroleum potential of the Neoproterozoic succession throughout the Amadeus Basin. Currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, principally researching evidence for pre-Ediacaran animal life in the Amadeus Basin, the Flinders Ranges and central India, as well as collaborating on identifying seismites in the coastal geology of the Fleurieu Peninsula.
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Presentation by prizewinning students: Prior to the main lecture the winners of the Brian Daily Memorial prizes will give a short presentation on their experiences at the 2nd year field mapping camp.
Refreshments will be served in the tea room following the meeting.
Members and visitors are warmly invited to attend.
For further information visit: www.fieldgeologyclubsa.org.au