Robert Beattie, 82, has found specimens of a 151m-year-old midge that challenge what we know about how the insects evolved
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.
