Fossil research wins prestigious award

Monash Professor Pat Vickers-Rich and husband Dr Tom Rich have won a joint international award for more than 30 years' work unraveling Victoria's ancient past.

Professor Vickers-Rich, from the Earth Sciences department, and Dr Rich, who is curator of vertabrate paleontology at Museum Victoria, received the $30,000 award from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration.

The society has funded their paleontological work at many sites along the Victorian coast and central and northern Australia since the 1970s.

Professor Vickers-Rich said the unexpected award represented three decades of comprehensive work gathering and interpreting fossils to examine life in Australia during and after the dinosaur age.

"At Flat Rocks, a site on the Victorian coast near Inverloch, we have been looking for evidence of animals including dinosaurs and mammals that might have lived in the region more than 100 million years ago," she said.

"At times we've even dug a mine in the cliff face of the Otway Ranges in a desperate attempt to get to the rocks that contain the fossils."

Flat Rocks has been the site of many discoveries by Professor Vickers-Rich, Dr Rich and their team including the dinosaur Qantassarus, named after Australian airline Qantas, and Ausktribosphenos nyktos, thought to be the oldest placental mammal ever found.

Professor Vickers-Rich has also co-authored books about dinosaurs and assembled international exhibitions.

She now runs the Monash Science Centre, which is dedicated to promoting science to young Australians.

Professor Vickers-Rich and Dr Rich. Courtesy of Time magazine.