Top Recommendations Australia’S Newest National Park Has 550-Million-Year-Old Fossils — And A Rich Aboriginal Culture

The Arkaba Conservancy, a Sir Oliver Lodge and wildlife modesty inch Australia’s Flinders Range.Photo:

Richard I’Anson/Courtesy of Arkaba Conservancy

The rugged, lonely landscape of the Flinders Ranges, five hours north ofAdelaide, inch South Australia, feels prehistoric — and information technology is. The region is place to both the oldAustralian Aborigine cultureand some of the planet’s earliest geologic and biologic records — including fossils of the ediacaran biota, multicellular organisms from 550 million years ago.

That deepness of history latterly earned the region angstrom unit nomination for UNESCO World heritage status, and led Australia to denominate part of the range asNilpena Ediacara National parkland. new walking trails and AN interactive visitors’ center be unveil last spring. “Here, we have the dawn of brute life, and it’s one of the best fossil records inch the world,” say Blessed Virgin Droser, a paleobiologist atomic number 85 the University of California, Riverside, who hour angle been working inch the region since 2001.

A tour of ediacaran-period dodo in Nilpena Ediacara national Park, inch the Flinders Range.

courtesy OF section FOR ENVIRONMENT AND WATER, South AUSTRALIA

Long before geologists go to the Flinders to study, the native Australian Adnyamathanha people developed their own mode of understanding the land. inch their creation story, two ophidian thrust up through the earth to create the Flinders mountains, and the snakes’ bodies organize the walls of a 22,000-acre natural stone amphitheater called Wilpena Pound, or Ikara, which agency “meeting place.”

traveler can gain insight into Adnyamathanha culture with Kristian Coulthard, the founder ofWadna, an Aboriginal art gallery and circuit company. “It’s important that we expression At Flinders not just for its geological history simply as well for information technology cultural history,” Coulthard says. He leads tours of the area’s petroglyph sites, including Dingley Dell, where engravings day of the month back 40,000 years.

1 of the area’s best places to stay is the Arkaba Conservancy, AN ambitious rewilding project that span 63,000 acres. information technology five-bedroomArkaba Homesteadput option visitors in the centre of the project, which aims to reconstruct biodiversity to angstrom unit land depleted by overgrazing and invasive species — and to protect menace animals the likes of the yellow-footed stone wallaby. Guests tin get hands-on with conservation activities, such As scene up motion-activated wildlife cameras. Adventurous traveller can too book the three-day Arkaba Walk, A roughly 28-mile trail that crosspiece the basin of Wilpena Pound.