The Kronosaurus Korner Museum in Richmond, Queensland, recently put a 100-million-year-old fossil pearl on display. The marble-sized calcite sphere, roughly two centimetres across, emerged during a public digging day in 2019 when a volunteer tourist lifted an Inoceramus shell fragment from the museum’s excavation site. After two years of laboratory study, researchers confirmed its authenticity and exceptional preservation.
“This is an incredibly rare and priceless find,” said Gregory Webb, a paleontologist at the University of Queensland, according to Cumhuriyet. He later called it “an invaluable fossil” in a statement quoted by Karar. Specialists noted that calcite outlasts the aragonite of modern pearls, explaining the object’s intact state after so many millennia.
The host animal, a giant Inoceramus clam that inhabited the Eromanga Sea, grew to about 50 centimetres and lived in waters around 40 metres deep. Richmond lies in one of the fossil-rich remnants of that inland sea, an area already known for marine reptiles such as Kronosaurus and Ichthyosaurus.
“The find makes Richmond more attractive to fossil hunters,” said Rob Ivers, founder of Kronosaurus Korner. The museum has used the pearl’s appeal to promote new education programs and supervised excavation experiences.
Visitors now view the pearl beside panels outlining the dig, the sea’s geology and the mineral chemistry behind its survival, while researchers conduct micro-CT scans to study internal growth rings.
The town’s tourism office reported a rise in accommodation bookings, and the museum confirmed higher daily attendance since the unveiling, though no figures were released. Experts cautioned that pearls of similar age are exceedingly rare, but staff expected the discovery to foster further scientific partnerships and economic gains for the outback community.
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