It was a funny little chap, different from the rest, so Ross Fargher, a Flinders Ranges station owner with a keen eye for fossils, did what any Australian would do. He took it home and left it on the back veranda.
That was four years ago. Now, the South Australian Museum believes Mr Fargher's fossil could be the oldest vertebrate ever found, the missing link between the shapeless cellular life that oozed across the sea floor and the eventual emergence of the animal kingdom. A distinctive stiffening rod runs along its back - the critical differentiation between multi-cellular blobs and the creatures that eventually became man.
"Imagine a tadpole about six centimetres long with a head end, what looks like a fin along the back and a series of muscle bands," said Jim Gehling, a research scientist in palaeontology at the SA Museum.
"It may not have actually been a fish, it may have crawled around on the bottom, which is what we think it was doing."
The discovery of the 560-million-year-old fossil might represent more than just the earliest evidence of vertebrate life. It might also define an area of the Flinders Ranges, 490 kilometres north of Adelaide, as one of the crucibles of life. The hills formed when a sea floor was thrust skyward.
Mr Fargher, a Flinders Ranges identity, who with his wife, Jane, runs the Prairie Hotel at Parachilna, found the fossil, known as a chordate, while examining some rippled rocks.
"I was riding along on the motorbike mustering or something and saw one of these areas and decided to pull up and have a bit of a walk around," he said. "I found a couple of fossils and I happened to see this. It's quite small and a lot of people wouldn't see it or recognise it as a fossil. I thought, 'that's an unusual one' and brought it home."
What may be the most precious fossil of its kind found remained on the back veranda - it was still there yesterday but its days in the open are numbered - while scientific interest slowly mounted. This area of the ranges is a magnet for scientists who have unearthed slabs of rock layered with the impressions of soft-bodied creatures known as Ediacaran biota (a name for the pre-Cambrian multi-cellular creatures discovered by geologist Reginald Sprigg in 1946 at an abandoned mine in the ranges' Ediacara Hills).
"The Flinders Ranges has the record of that really crucial part of history - from the very earliest evidence of any complex multi-celled life through to the first things with backbones, scales, shells and armour," Dr Gehling said.
He took a latex impression of the chordate fossil and began researching it in comparison with other discoveries, particularly those made in northern America and China.
"I realised we were looking at something extremely similar... more basic and certainly very much older than the very oldest things that have been described from China," he said.
To confirm his interest was valid, he invited two colleagues, Russian professor Miskha Fendonkin, who worked on similar discoveries on the north coast of Russia, and Monash Science Centre dinosaur authority, Professor Pat Rich, to view the fossil. They agreed it was a significant find, he said.
Dr Gehling was more embarrassed than pleased yesterday that news of the discovery had leaked out before it was properly recorded and published in a science magazine.
"It's really bad form to talk about these things before you publish them," he said.
Dr Gehling will visit the Farghers to negotiate the fossil's removal to Adelaide.
Ross and Jane Fargher, who transformed the rundown Prairie Hotel into a mecca for film and television crews and eco-tourists, do not want to see local fossils vanish into city museums.
"I've been protective of it because there have been a lot of fossils that have gone from the area down to the museum," Mr Fargher said yesterday.
"They only need so many to study, I think they are better off being left in the field."
But this one, he admits, was destined to continue a journey that began when a creature burrowed into the warm silt of the sea floor 560 million years ago.
He said it proved the Flinders Ranges were among the most amazing places on earth.
"You look at this blob on the ground and say, 'there goes our ancestor'," he said.
"I keep saying we've only been here for a couple of hundred years. If we all got wiped out in another 500, we wouldn't even be noticed."
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