Here in the bug house, we’re excited to unveil our fully rebuilt laboratory—now three times larger than before—offering significantly more space for our expanding suite of services.
And thanks to the amazing talents of local WA artist Lawry Halden, our lab has a new look to go with its new capabilities, with a spray-painted mural of selected palynomorphs honouring some of Australia’s most famous palynologists set against a Mesozoic landscape!
So come on in and have a look around.
Time for a rebuild
Our original lab, built in 2012 after relocating the main office from Roger’s farm in Maitland (South Australia) to Perth (Western Australia), served us well for over a decade. But as our workloads grew, so did our need for space, technology, and adaptability. In late 2024, we took the leap and began rebuilding the lab from the ground up, tripling its size and equipping it with modern infrastructure, including a main fume cupboard twice the size of the original.
In an effort to brighten up our work environment, we recently had the outside of our newly upgraded and refurbished laboratory painted. The very talented Lawry Halden did a brilliant job bringing to life a multi-coloured and loosely Mesozoic coastline across the outer walls of the laboratory.
We also wanted to add a series of notable Mesozoic spores, pollen, and dinocysts to this wall artwork — these were intended to pay homage to some of the pre-eminent Australian palynologists. Unfortunately, we could only fit in nine of these organic microfossils, so we decided to largely concentrate on Jurassic and Cretaceous specimens. However, this meant we missed out on commemorating some of our favourite Palaeozoic palynologists like Peter Price.
The obvious place to start when choosing which spores and pollen to depict is with the three founding figures of Australian palynology — Isabel C. Cookson, Basil E. Balme, and Noel Jack de Jersey. Nearly all Australian-trained palynologists can trace their academic family tree back to these three doyens.
Isabel Cookson, known to friends as ‘one tough cookie’, pioneered the study of spores and pollen in this country in the mid-1940s, going on to describe over 500 fossil species and 100 fossil genera in her prolific, nearly 60-year career. These included describing such notable fossils as Baragwanathia, at the time the oldest known vascular land plant (~400 million years old). Several species painted on our walls are either named after Isabel Cookson (Contignisporites cooksoniae Dettmann 1963) or were described by her (Pilosisporites notensis Cookson & Dettmann 1958).
An early compatriot of Isabel’s in Western Australia was Basil Balme. He was probably best known for his coal field palynology, Permian and Triassic taxonomic works, and critical compilations linking spores and pollen with their parent plants. However, his greatest legacy is possibly through his teachings at The University of Western Australia where he introduced the fledgling science of palynology to eager audiences, including several influential future palynologists.
The next fossil spore we selected was Triplexisporites playfordii (de Jersey & Hamilton 1967) Foster 1979. Remarkably it is linked to four Australian palynologists. Noel de Jersey and Marion Hamilton named this distinctive Permo–Triassic boundary spore after Geoffrey Playford, a student of Basil’s and another proud West Australian and a remarkably industrious palynologist. Geoff is particularly well known for his Carboniferous and Devonian studies but has published critical taxonomic studies across much of the fossiliferous timescale.
Geoff first found these tiger-striped spores (originally assigned to the genus Tigrisporites) in Tasmania in the early 1960s. These spores were later transferred to Triplexisporites by one of his illustrious students, Clinton Foster, who himself had a prominent career in palynology before going on to become the Chief Scientist at Geoscience Australia.
Another incredibly talented palynologist active from the 1950s was Mary E. Dettmann. Amongst her critical works is an outstanding synthesis of south-eastern Australia palynofloras from the Upper Mesozoic. Although published in 1963, this paper remains one of the most referred to taxonomic works in our office.
Mary didn’t confine herself to biostratigraphic studies and worked on such varied topics as forensic palynology, Antarctic projects, and even using palynology to track the feeding habits of the Endangered Mahogany Gliders (a rare small possum whose nocturnal habits were otherwise difficult to study). Unfortunately, we don’t have a photo of Mary for this newsletter.
Fostericysta eclipsiana (Riding & Helby 2001) Riding 2005 is a charismatic Middle Jurassic dinoflagellate cyst named after Clinton Foster by Jim Riding and Robin Helby. Although based at the British Geological Survey in Nottingham for most his career, Jim has published prolifically on Australian dinoflagellates particularly through collaborations with Robin and Geoscience Australia.
Of course, there was no greater person to study Australian dinocysts with than the commanding Robin Helby. He had a photographic memory of anything relating to palynology and was known as the ‘consultant’s consultant’ such was his willingness to share his great knowledge.
One of the species described by Robin is Muderongia australis. This is of course the MGPalaeo logo first chosen by Roger Morgan in the 1980s shortly after he established Morgan Palaeo Associates. Roger was another of the greats of Australian industrial palynology and first encountered this funky dinocyst whilst working on his PhD in the late 1970s.
This spectacular Mesozoic mural has really brought our lab to life, and it’s been wonderful to honour some of the key figures who paved the way for us. We have more famous figures to honour in the next development of the lab!
But for now, as we settle into this new edition of MGPalaeo, we’ll continue to build on the additional services we can now offer – modern-day palynology, plus phytolith and diatom analysis, and anthracology, enabling us to expand our reach into areas such as archaeology, palaeoecology, and environmental monitoring. We’re also actively exploring additional service lines and technologies to complement our biostratigraphic and sedimentological capabilities, and we’re excited to share more on these as they continue to develop.
To celebrate our brand-new laboratory in Malaga (Western Australia), we’re launching a blog series designed to help you select the best samples possible for palynological analysis. Look out for the next instalments: “A Field Guide to Palynology Sampling” and “How Selective Sampling Reduces Caving.”
While you look out for those articles, please contact us at [email protected] or visit www.mgpalaeo.com.au to discuss how our revitalised, full-scale lab can support your projects.
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