Australian trilobite studies

Australian trilobites have been studied since their first report in 1845 by a wide range of people for a variety of different reasons. They are known from all Paleozoic Periods and from all Paleozoic basins or depositional regions. The early phase of discovery in the populated southeast part of Australia made known a few trilobites that were collected with other shelly faunas. Despite the efforts of McCoy; Clarke; de Koninck; Etheridge, Sr.; Etheridge, Jr.; and Tate, very few trilobite taxa were recognized from the entire continent by the end of the nineteenth century. Etheridge and Mitchell’s work on the Upper Silurian of the Yass Basin, Mitchell’s on the Carboniferous, and Whitehouse’s on the Middle and Upper Cambrian of northwest Queensland were pioneering studies that began to detail the size of the Australian faunas and tried to develop a trilobite-based biostratigraphy. After World War II, the Bureau of Mineral Resources began mapping the large sedimentary basins of northern and central Australia, and great numbers of trilobites were discovered and described by Öpik and, later, by Shergold. Trilobite studies were carried on in numerous university geology departments from the 1950s, with the most productive group established by Ken Campbell, who supervised Engel, Chatterton, Jell, and Holloway, among others. Although more than 1000 Australian trilobite taxa are known, knowledge of existing collections shows that many remain to be described.