Retired Australian teacher discovers the oldest fossil of its kind in southern hemisphere – and a new species

As a boy, holidaying with his family in the New South Wales coastal town of Gerringong, Robert Beattie found a shell in a rock. It turned out to be hundreds of millions of years old – a Permian fossil, common to the Sydney basin. “I couldn’t believe it,” Beattie recalls. “I’ve been interested in fossils ever since.” That childhood discovery, made in 1948, sparked a lifelong passion for palaeontology, one that that has taken him to dig sites across Australia’s eastern states, seen him present his findings internationally – and discover a fossil that changes what we know about how insects evolved. Related: ‘Deceptively cute’ ancient whale with razor-sharp teeth and eyes the size of tennis balls discovered in Australia For all of his professional life, Beattie worked as a science and agriculture teacher, spending his weekends and spare time collecting fossils – and, in the 1960s, studying palaeontology at Macquarie University. Since his late teens, Beattie has had an association with the Australian Museum, bringing to the institution’s front desk specimens he collected on his expeditions – fish fossils extracted from the rubble of an old sewer tunnel near Longueville on Sydney’s lower north shore; insects from fossil beds at Belmont, near Newcastle. When he retired from teaching at age 59, Beattie devoted himself full-time to his passion. In 2016, he gave a talk at a conference in Edinburgh, about some tiny insects he had found at Talbragar, a fossil site in NSW’s central tablelands. His presentation caught the eye of Dr Viktor Baranov, a palaeontologist at the Doñana Biological Station in Spain. “He said: you know those things you had up on the screen? They are midges,” Beattie recalls. In early 2020, before Covid shut Australia’s borders, Baranov visited the Australian Museum, where Beattie’s undescribed specimens were held. Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter After years of work, scientists confirmed that the fossilised specimens were about 151m years old, dating from the Australian Jurassic period, and that what Beattie had discovered was a new species of non-biting midge – the oldest fossil of its kind in the southern hemisphere. The findings, described in a research paper published in the journal Gondwana Research, challenge what the researchers say are long-held assumptions about how that group of insects evolved. “Robert collected these fossils over about a 10-year period,” says study co-author Dr Matthew McCurry, of the Australian Museum. “We really didn’t understand the importance until we started studying them quite recently.” The specimens belong to the Podonominae subfamily of midges; the oldest known fossils had previously come from China and Siberia, which had led scientists to assume the freshwater animals originated from the northern ancient supercontinent of Laurasia. We’re putting so much more effort into finding fossils in the northern hemisphere – that results in biases Matthew McCurry, Australian Museum But Beattie’s find, according to the new study, suggests the insects likely originated in the southern hemisphere, on the supercontinent of Gondwana. Podonominae are insects that feed on nectar rather than blood, and are still found around the world today. “They’re still very ecologically important,” McCurry says. About 80% of biodiversity of the group today is found in the southern hemisphere, adding weight to the Gondwanan origin hypothesis. McCurry says a strong geographical bias in fossil research has skewed scientific understanding of evolutionary origins. “If you look at any map of where fossils are being found, the hotspots are always in the northern hemisphere … it’s where there’s a lot of palaeontologists working, it’s where there’s a lot of money funding palaeontology,” he says. “We’re putting so much more effort into finding fossils in the northern hemisphere – that results in biases in our understanding of the past as well.” “This midge in particular … is an example of the fact that when we actually do look in the southern hemisphere, there are fossils to find, and they can start to correct that understanding.” The team named the new species Telmatomyia talbragarica, translating to “fly from the stagnant waters”. “[The fossil site] seems to have been a mud pond of some kind, so we have insects at all stages of their development from there,” Beattie says. At 82, the avid fossil hunter, now a research associate at the Australian Museum, has no intention of slowing down; he has a field trip planned next month to Penrose, in the NSW southern highlands. When asked about how it feels to discover a fossil with noteworthy evolutionary implications, Beattie is unbothered. “Oh, we all do it,” he says. “Lots of people find all sorts.”