The former Bank of Victoria – now the Port Albert Maritime Museum

How Ancient Plants Shaped Gippsland’s Lost World

Before birds took to the skies and mammals emerged from the shadows, a silent revolution unfolded on the forest floors and riverbanks of what we now call Gippsland. Somewhere between the age of dinosaurs and the last days of Gondwana, the world’s first flowering plants, angiosperms, began to bloom.

This wasn’t just a pretty change in the landscape. It was a botanical upheaval that transformed ecosystems across the planet. In the shaded, swampy valleys of the ancient Strzelecki Group, these pioneering flowers opened their petals for the first time, changing what the dinosaurs ate, what insects pollinated, and how life on Earth evolved.

Gippsland holds part of that floral origin story, etched into layers of fossil-rich rock and echoed in the temperate rainforests still clinging to its ranges today.

From Ferns to Flowers: A Global Shift

For hundreds of millions of years, the world’s green cover was dominated by spore-bearing plants, ferns, horsetails, and conifers. These plants thrived in moisture and shade, reproducing without seeds or flowers. But during the Early Cretaceous, around 130–100 million years ago, angiosperms began to appear.

The earliest flowers were small, simple, and often overlooked, not showy garden blooms, but modest experiments in reproductive innovation. Unlike conifers, which used cones and wind-blown pollen, angiosperms used insects to spread pollen more efficiently. They also enclosed their seeds in fruit, giving future plant life a new way to travel, thrive, and diversify.

This gave them a distinct advantage in the rapidly changing climates of the Cretaceous.

The Koonwarra Fossil Bed: A Snapshot of Early Flora

While the most famous Victorian dinosaur fossils come from Dinosaur Cove and Inverloch, the Koonwarra Fossil Bed, southeast of Leongatha, offers a unique look at the ecosystem plants were building.

Koonwarra is a lagerstätte, a site of exceptional fossil preservation. Its fine-grained mudstones have revealed:

• Fossilised leaves and flowers, including angiosperms
• Ancient insects, like beetles and wasps, likely early pollinators
• Delicate fish skeletons and evidence of aquatic life
• Even feathers, suggesting nearby bird-like dinosaurs

Among these discoveries are early flowering plants that help scientists track when and where angiosperms first took root in Gondwana. Their tiny, symmetrical petals and enclosed seeds mark a clear break from the world of cycads and ginkgoes.

What Grew in Ancient Gippsland?

The forests of Early Cretaceous Gippsland would have looked alien to modern eyes yet strangely familiar in places. Dominated by spore-bearing plants and early conifers, these were cool-temperate rainforests, damp and dense, filled with low light and steady rainfall. They formed part of the broader Gondwanan forest belt, a vital green lung for the southern hemisphere during the age of dinosaurs.

Fossil evidence from the Strzelecki Group and neighbouring formations such as Koonwarra reveals a wide range of prehistoric flora, including:

• Tree ferns, especially species similar to Dicksonia and Cyathea, populated the understorey. Their fronds, preserved in fossil beds, are nearly identical to those found in modern temperate gullies today.
• Coniferous trees such as Bellarinea richardsii, a deciduous conifer described from the Tyers River Subgroup, are known from well-preserved foliage fossils. Other conifers like Podocarpus and Araucaria likely dominated the upper canopy, forming vertical complexity across swampy valleys.
• Ginkgo-like plants, such as Ginkgoites australis, added to the prehistoric diversity. These broad-leaf gymnosperms, with fan-shaped leaves, were already ancient by the time flowering plants appeared.
• Cycads and possibly Leongathia, an early gnetophyte genus, grew near rivers and floodplains. Gnetophytes are seed-bearing but unrelated to true flowering plants, representing a once-diverse group that is now reduced to a few arid-adapted species.
• Early angiosperms are recorded at Koonwarra in the form of small, symmetrical fossil flowers and broad-leafed impressions. Though often unnamed, their form and structure point to primitive shrubs or herbs, among the earliest of their kind on the continent.
• Aquatic plants, including algae and primitive duckweed analogues, thrived in the freshwater lakes and wetlands, often fossilised alongside fish and insects.

These forests supported a multilayered habitat with abundant resources, canopy shade, leaf litter, decaying wood, and stable water sources, ideal for a broadening array of invertebrate life.

Insects and Pollination: Partners in Evolution

As flowering plants began their slow but transformative spread through Gippsland’s forests, the insect world responded. Fossil beds such as those at Koonwarra have preserved a remarkable array of Early Cretaceous insects, offering one of the best windows into Gondwana’s ancient invertebrate biodiversity.

Among the named species discovered:

• Tarwinia australis, a primitive flea and one of the earliest known members of its kind, was unearthed at Koonwarra. Its presence suggests that small mammals, potential hosts, may also have lived in the area.
• Duncanovelia extensa, a fossil water beetle, and Chauliognathus koonwarra, the world’s oldest described soldier beetle, demonstrate that the Coleoptera were already diverse and functionally specialised.
• Eodinotoperla duncanae, a fossilised stonefly nymph, hints at cold, oxygen-rich freshwater streams, where it likely spent most of its life before maturing.
• Koonwarraphis rotundafrons, an Early Cretaceous aphid, represents the complex evolution of plant-sap-feeding insects, perhaps already exploiting flowering shrubs.
• Koonaspides indistinctus, a freshwater syncarid crustacean, and Victalimulus mcqueeni, a rare freshwater horseshoe crab, round out the aquatic invertebrate community, showing a well-established food web in ancient Gippsland lakes.

These insect species point to the growing complexity of pollination and plant-insect relationships. The emergence of flowers introduced nectar and pollen into the ecosystem, attracting beetles, flies, wasps, and other pollinators. Though true bees would not appear until later, these early insects were already interacting with angiosperms in ways that shaped the course of terrestrial evolution.

Climate and the Forest Environment

Early Cretaceous Gippsland had a cool-temperate, wet climate, with frequent rainfall and limited sunlight in winter months. Snow was likely, and the forest canopy created a dim, closed-in world ideal for mosses, fungi, and ferns.

Despite the cold, plants thrived due to long summer daylight hours and rich volcanic soils. The landscape included:

• River deltas and swamps
• Shallow lakes and boggy floodplains
• Low hills cloaked in forest

This environment gave flowering plants the space to spread and adapt, gradually outcompeting slower-reproducing ferns and cycads in many niches.

A Living Legacy: Tarra-Bulga and Beyond

Today, places like Tarra-Bulga National Park preserve remnants of these ancient forests. While most modern trees and shrubs are newcomers in evolutionary terms, species like:

• Myrtle beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii)
• Sassafras, wattles, and southern laurels
• Tree ferns and mossy undergrowth

All bear genetic and ecological links to the Cretaceous plant world. Walking through these gullies is a stroll through evolutionary history, a forest shaped over millions of years, with roots deep in Gondwana.

Why Flowers Matter

The rise of flowering plants wasn’t just about colour and beauty. It changed:

• Ecosystems, by supporting more insects and animals
• Soils, by creating more organic matter and faster cycles
• Climate, by influencing water retention and carbon cycling
• Evolution, by opening up new niches for animals and insects

In Gippsland, it laid the groundwork for everything that came after: the mammals, the birds, and ultimately, us.

The Bloom That Changed the World

The ancient forests of Gippsland didn’t just hide dinosaurs and giant amphibians, they cradled the first blossoms of a planetary revolution.

Flowering plants were quiet innovators, steadily overtaking the old fern-and-conifer world, and bringing with them complexity, colour, and new life.

Next time you walk through a gully in Tarra-Bulga or see a native flower blooming near the coast, imagine its ancestors, tiny, tenacious, and quietly rewriting the rules of life beneath the feet of dinosaurs.