At Lightning Ridge, palaeontologists, opal miners and fossil collectors come together to dig up precious relics

One in a billion bones becomes a fossil — even fewer turn into opal. In a pocket of north-western New South Wales, two pioneering women are uncovering relics of our deep past. 

In a small room of a timber-clad motel, two fossil hunters are chatting excitedly about a deal that's just been struck.

On the table between them lays a small black plastic dish with the prized purchase, lit from above by a solitary lamp.  

"I'm 99 per cent sure they're shark's teeth," one man says, eyeing the tiny triangular treasures in front of him.

In this part of the world, one shark tooth would be rare enough — three is an extraordinarily unlikely find.  

But they temper their imaginations until the expert arrives. 

Jenni Brammall is a palaeontologist who's been studying relics like these in one of the world's most fossil-rich regions for more than 30 years. 

Pulling up a chair, she knows before she’s even sat down. These are shark’s teeth. 

Adjusting her magnified goggles, Jenni carefully rolls the teeth between her fingertips under the light.

“Two of these have got this incredible microstructure that you can see on the inside because they’re translucent,” she says, now seated and focused, examining each tooth that time has turned to gemstone.  

The motel room is silent.  

"I don't often see you stuck for words, Jenni," one of the men jokes. 

But Jenni barely looks up — she's lost in the history of the fossils in front of her. 

The story of how they got here is a mystery that dates back 100 million years.

Cretaceous treasures 

In north-west New South Wales, the opal mining town of Lighting Ridge sits atop a Cretaceous coastal flood plain. 

The dry, eucalypt and acacia-covered landscape around here is just its latest ecological evolution. 

"Central Australia was occupied by an inland sea that opened up to the north," Jenni explains. 

"Lightning Ridge was heavily forested — dominated by pines and tree ferns, with rivers and streams running through them, toward the sea."

Over millions of years, the remains of plants, dinosaurs, crocodiles and mammals were buried in the clay and sand of the river beds. Long after they decomposed, water rich in silica ran through the earth, filling the cracks and voids where bones and shell once lay.

As the water slowly soaked away, it left behind layers of microscopic silica dioxide spheres: the tiny building blocks of opal.

These spheres diffract white light into brilliant colour — purples, blues, pinks and greens — and in rare cases, form precious opalised fossil.

"You've got this ridiculously, unexpected and rare situation," Jenni says. 

"Two natural phenomena that are stupidly unlikely — the formation of a fossil and the formation of opal — coalescing in these objects.

"That's just wild." 

Common opal can be found all over the world, but the precious, coloured opal of Lightning Ridge is exceedingly rare.  

The traditional owners of this land have a longstanding relationship with opal. For thousands of years, stories have linked opal with the rainbow serpent, a key part of the Euahlayi creation story.

"When you look at an opal and you see the different colours through it, it's like a rainbow," says Euahlayi elder, Aunty Brenda McBride.

But the association with the precious stone is more ominous.

"The rainbow serpent is a snake, and what is a snake? It’s a devil," Aunty Brenda says.

"Opal is taboo to Aboriginal people." 

When colonisation forced the Euahlayi people from their homes and hunting grounds, opal became a valuable source for trading and bartering with settlers and pastoralists who had taken over their lands.

"Aboriginal people did find the first lot of opal. These fellas didn't dig opal shafts, they found it in the gullies,” Aunty Brenda says.

Opalised fossils continue to be dug up around Lightning Ridge to this day, but among some Euahlayi, there is still a certain reluctance to be physically near it for too long.

But for others, these iridescent relics have unlocked ecological mysteries that have redefined our understanding of evolution. 

Enchanting fossil frontier 

Decoding the natural world and the stories layered in the ground beneath have always been a feature of Elizabeth Smith's life. 

She has spent more than 50 years uncovering and identifying rare fossils in Lightning Ridge, and striking deals with collectors and opal miners to preserve these artefacts of deep geological history. 

It's a love that runs deep.

As a child Liz would tag along with her mother, a landscape gardener, traipsing through bushland around Sydney, and combing the Beacon Hill quarry for shale fossils. 

"We'd go up there with hammers and chisels as little kids and break open these rocks looking for fish," she says. 

Studying palaeontology was a logical next step, and years later it motivated a move to the opal mining fields in north-west New South Wales.  

With two children, Liz and her husband Bob lived in a stone cottage on the Three Mile opal field in Lightning Ridge.  

"It was it was almost a dirt floor. It was a little tiny stone cottage with a very low ceiling, and just just a complete sweat box in summer," Liz says.

Bob was mining opal without much success, and Liz was homeschooling the kids and "specking" for opal and fossils in piles of old mine tailings. 

"For some of that time at least we were surviving on little tiny bits of opal that were found on the surface," she says. 

Amongst the sandstone, clay, and low value, colourless opal known as potch, Liz started to find pieces of opalised fossils. 

"There was evidence of past life forms everywhere," Liz says. 

"I was picking up mussel shells, and yabby buttons and little pine cones that looked like roses."

Some of the piles of opal dirt, dug from up to 30 metres underground, had been untouched for decades. 

This was the start of what would become Liz's life work, and a legacy she continues to build. 

Living on the opal fields, Liz and Bob's reputation for recording and cataloguing fossils grew among the miners, and so did relationships between this unique assortment of characters. 

"There was somebody who had an octopus in a claim just on the other side of town, all sorts of absolutely wacky and wonderful stories."

Liz bought what books she could to help learn about the types of fossils she was logging, but no-one had studied the fossils of Lightning Ridge before.

So she made drawings and descriptions of the fossils that she found, or was shown by miners.

In the meantime, Bob was experimenting with macrophotography, capturing the opals and fossils that miners brought to them. 

"Black opal is the most amazing gemstone on the planet," he says.

"The images that come out of it, especially at magnification, are just totally unexpected."

Sometimes this was the only chance to view and study these time capsules. The fossils belonged to the miners, and could end up anywhere. 

Over many years Bob has perfected a technique involving layers of lens extenders and a handheld light he's fashioned out of an old lamp. 

Upgrading from film to digital, Bob has come up with his own method of animating his photography and bringing opal to life. 

Keeping the camera still, frame by frame he moves the light around the precious stone, capturing the shape and colours formed within it by nature. 

"I move the lights around, either one light or multiple lights," Bob says. 

"As the light moves around the stone, the patterns change."

"But the patterns change also as the lights move up and down, rather than around.  

"So there's multiple patterns that emerge, especially from top gems.

"Some opals produce only a few images, and others will just keep on producing images each time the light has changed a couple of degrees."

Together, Liz and Bob started working on what would become the seminal book on this globally significant fossil deposit. 

It would change the game for at least one life-long opal miner and Lightning Ridge local.

To sell, or save

Butch McFadden's sprawling mining claim is like a living open-air museum. 

Repurposed cement mixers used for washing opal dirt line the ridge. Rusty trucks, dozers and loaders are parked around the gum trees, ready and waiting. 

A red rattler train carriage that's been turned into living quarters is guarded by a cattle dog. 

"I've been here 42 years, I'll be here another 40 if I can," Butch says.

Opal is what pays the bills in his line of work, and the ever-present prospect of finding a valuable seam of colour fuels each day. 

It has seen him cross paths with miners, collectors and traders from all over Australia, and world-class palaeontologists like Jenni and Liz.

Reading Liz and Bob's book on fossils redefined opal mining for Butch. 

"Because that thing's been sitting there waiting for you to come along and find it, and be the first living being to see that since it died 110 million years ago."

But mining opal costs money, and there’s never a guarantee that you'll find stone worth selling. 

And if the only opal you find is opalised fossil, it can be tempting to sell them. 

It's a scenario that Butch has been over in his mind many times.

To date, he’s donated many of the fossils he’s found to the Australian Opal Centre. 

There's also the cultural gifts program, which allows miners to offset their taxable income by the value of the fossil they donate. 

"If something pops up, and I get a dinosaur bone with a red bar and black base underneath, that's worth $200,000 or $300,000, then it's going to be a little bit conflicting," he says. 

"I just hope that I'm in a position where it's still not going to matter."

For Jenni and Liz, who have worked together for decades, navigating the tensions that these financial realities present is an art they continue to refine in the interest of the science. 

"We will never tell somebody that what they have is insignificant, just because we're hoping that they might give it to us," says Jenni, who is also CEO of the Australian Opal Centre in Lightning Ridge. 

The reality is, many of the fossils that miners find will be destroyed in the search for valuable opal. 

And if it's not cut for jewellery, fossils can be sold to collectors. 

"I've seen a lot of stuff that clearly has just disappeared onto the commercial market, and it's gone forever, it'll presumably never reach a museum or research," Liz says. 

Jenni’s enthusiasm for her field of work, and the community she's spent 30 years building to advance the knowledge base, has never wavered. 

"It's a real balancing act … working with [people] to help them understand the significance and potential of what they've found, and then facing the reality that the miner probably needs to get some sort of commercial return from their fossils," she says. 

Finding Fostoria 

Just an hour south-west of Lightning Ridge is the site of one of Australia's most significant fossil finds.

Near the famous Sheepyard Inn is an opal field where Greg Foster struck prehistoric gold in the 1980s. 

Working alongside his father Bob on the family mine, Greg began unearthing large pieces of what they thought was opal-bearing rock. 

They started breaking open chunks of potch looking for colour.

"We did not have one inkling of it at all. It wasn't till we started seeing joints … [I thought] 'Hang on, that looks like a big cow's bone you'd buy for your dog,'" Greg recalls.

That's when they put their tomahawks and hammers down. These were dinosaur bones.

Greg's father Bob packed the opalised bones into a duffel bag, drove to Sydney, and asked to speak to the palaeontologist at the Australian Museum. 

"I think it took him a little bit of effort to get through the gatekeepers," Jenni recalls.

Eventually Bob was able to meet with world-renowned expert Alex Ritchie. 

"Alex knew that he had something absolutely exceptional, something that had never been seen in New South Wales and probably not even in the world," Jenni says.

A team of soldiers was mobilised to help the Fosters recover the rest of the fossils from their mine.

After decades of study, palaeontologists were able to piece together the remains of four different animals from 60 opalised bones.

Bob and Greg had dug up the bones of a previously undiscovered species, a two-legged plant-eating dinosaur that was named in their honour: Fostoria dhimbangunmal.

Fostoria is just the tip of the iceberg. 

This region is critical to the global understanding of mammal and monotreme evolution, and the study of Lightning Ridge fossils is still in its infancy.   

Liz and Jenni have about 80 years of experience between them. 

"We're trying to build a community of people, both qualified palaeontologists and amateur palaeontologists, who are inheriting some of the knowledge we have," Jenni says. 

"So if Liz and I were both to disappear in a palaeo-tardis, then yeah, there'd be some challenges, but we're building out that knowledge base." 

Peer-reviewed papers continue to be published on the fossils in the Australian Opal Centre that Liz and Jenni helped found.

Instead of fossils being sent away to bigger, city-based institutions, Lightning Ridge fossils have stayed on the country they were dug from. 

After all these years, they remain in awe of the fossils and the stories they tell. 

"Their meaning is created partly by their context — not just by what they are as objects in isolation, [but] where the communities and the people, who are the discoverers and the custodians, can benefit from them as well," Jenni says.

"You pick up a dinosaur tooth with colour in it, so you've got these two extraordinary natural stories in one piece that just combines so much information," Liz adds.

Back inside room number one at the Lightning Ridge motel, Butch and his collector friend Mike are watching as Jenni assesses the shark teeth. 

Mike lives in Adelaide, and his old Commodore has driven the long open roads many times to and from the Ridge. 

Like the miners, sometimes the trips yield valuable opal and fossils for his collection, and sometimes he has to absorb the cost of business. 

This trio have known each other for years, and they all know each other's priorities. 

Mike and Butch need to make a living, and Jenni is a soldier for her science. 

"Based on the teeth in our collection I think there's at least two types of shark here, which is interesting," she notes, carefully rotating the teeth between her fingertips. 

"I haven't learned the diagnostic features and I don't know if there's enough here to be able to put these in one group or another."

Then she reverts to a script she’s delivered over decades, possibly in motel rooms like this with other fossil buyers. 

"Not to put you under any pressure, but if in future you were thinking of gifting the Australian Opal Centre with another portion of your collection, we would be extremely delighted to see those amongst them."

Like Butch, Mike — even with his child-like enthusiasm for dinosaurs and his fossil collection — has his own set of ethics. 

Jenni thanks him and turns to Butch.

"You're my witness," she says, only half joking. 

Credits:

Reporting, photography and videography: Nathan Morris and Angela Heathcote, with additional archival material courtesy of Elizabeth and Bob Smith

Production: Nathan Morris

Editing: Lucy Sweeney