with Prof Patricia Vickers-Rick

The Ghastly Blank, once used to describe outback Australia in the 1800s, was the name given to the swashbuckling palaeo excavations of the National Geographic Society led by Patricia and Tom at Dinosaur Cove and later along the Bass Coast, many places (especially Dinosaur Cove!) of high waters and sheer cliffs once joined to Antarctica to form the supercontinent, Gondwana as well as many expeditions into Central Australia.

Patricia (Pat) Vickers-Rich has studied the fingerprint of life spanning nearly a billion years; and can authoritatively assert that the crisis in climate and species extinction we confront today is not, as many have asserted in the past, mere natural fluctuations, and today supposedly claimed by many outside the influence of anthropogenic forcings. 

She and husband Dr Tom Rich (Curator of Palaeontology at Museums Victoria), both from the US, have led Australia’s exploration of its ancient history, studying the biota of Gondwana and collecting more than 70% of the country’s Mesozoic mammalian fossils, most from along the Bass Coast near Inverloch, also part of the Ghastly Blank Project.

From her perspective, which spans millennia, one of the biggest issues today is human population.

“Just in the space of my own lifetime,” she says, “the world’s population has gone from 2.3 billion in 1944 to 8.1 billion in 2024. And the problems of power, inequality, war and planetary destruction have multiplied apace with population. A sensible and compassionate humanity would deal with these issues before bringing more children into the world. As the UN points out, women’s education, more equality, and the subsequent fall in birthrates, would greatly help alleviate the pressure on this planet. Of course, doing so needs careful management to avoid economic collapse, but the ideas of, for example, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, who want trillions of people, are beyond insane.”

“We are definitely in a major extinction event because of our behaviour, our consumption and human population. Yes, extinction events can be natural if it’s caused by volcanic eruptions or asteroids but I’ve gone back 2 billion years and the earlier extinctions like the Cambrian (more than 500 million years ago) and Cretaceous (66 million years ago) and end of the Permian (252 million years ago) were all functionally different from today.”

“Today we are witnessing an extinction event on a faster timescale than ever before, and we as humans are having an effect just as devastating as either volcanoes or asteroids in the past. The worst event was the Permian-Triassic Extinction wiping out somewhere around 96% of species due to vast Siberian Traps volcanic eruptions pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, just like today. And another major change in the worlds biota changed at the Precambrian-Cambrian transition around 538 million years ago — when a weird world changed into something more like what we have today as far as the biota.”

“We as humans are acting like super volcanoes by re-releasing billions of years of gases from fossil fuels, far over and above the natural carbon cycle and the ability of natural planetary sinks to cope with them. The previous extinctions were pretty dramatic affairs, but so is now.”

Pat has worked across borders with scientists in Japan, Russia, the Ukraine, Germany, Iran, Namibia, Timor-Leste, Saudi Arabia and Argentina, etc., all of them beautiful collaborations with good people, with warm invitations to join their national researchers and societies. Having grown up in California, being part Cherokee, Pat grew up in a culture of cooperation rather than control, and looks on the world of war, power and money with increasing dismay. 

“I just don’t understand why we’re at war,” she says plaintively. 

The human drive to power pushes climate change and inequality, and sadly the effects of climate change itself are likely to accelerate war in the future, not only because of a growing population having to fight over dwindling resources, but also because of the recently established link between periods of high temperatures and civil war tracked by social scientists looking at the past 2000 years. 

“Why can’t we learn to get along and work cooperatively all around the world? Can we not find ways to work together to try to save this beautiful planet that sustains us and have some respect for each other?”

This is hardly a superficial plea when it comes from Pat. She and husband Tom mortgaged their home to support the Monash Science Centre as well as support students and field work, leveraging their own funds to employ people and build a growing army of more than 700 staff and volunteers, many of whom also put funds into these activities. Under the patronage of her longstanding friend, Sir David Attenborough, the Monash Science Centre was built to inspire and educate children of all ages, to engage them in science education and teach them about planetary health and how they might help sustain it. It was a place where schools and community groups like scouts could come and see and touch everything from dinosaur bones to medical exhibits where kids could try their hand with models of surgery and use their own observations to come to conclusions about things — not just depend on their mobile phones and other authorities without first checking out their reliability. 

Attracting millions of visitors from all around the world, it covered exhibitions on geosciences, her specialty palaeobiology, natural disasters, human medical biology, science and art, astronomy, scientific instrumentation, and climate change and many other topics. It was moved to Swinburne and renamed PrimeSci! in 2012, where it continues its outreach programs to schools and children the world over.

Today’s projects with PrimeSci!, other than its continued outreach to schools, includes collaborations with the Science Centre Singapore and many other global institutions, helping to pull together scientifically accurate and exciting exhibitions (such as the present DinoQuest now on in Chengdu China and to travel on to generate research funds and stimulate science education) and building a new sustainability facility. And besides DinoQuest heir work also includes other exhibitions on the polar dinosaurs led by Pat and her husband on display in places like the RACV Resort and the Information Centre near and in Inverloch, Victoria. In their book, the Dinosaurs of Darkness (2020), they describe a vast array of previously unknown creatures from Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand, Alaska, and South America who thrived in polar winters where temperatures plunged below freezing. 

One among them, for example, was Koolasuchus cleelandi, named after the preparator Lesley Kool and the discoverer Mike Cleeland, was a car-sized creature with a head the size of a council rubbish bin that lived along the Victorian coast 125 million years ago, that is until the early Cretaceous period when temperatures rose, and the crocodiles moved in to take over their role as the local apex predator. Koolasuchus is now the Victorian state fossil! Another such creature, named after Pat herself by a Russian colleague, was found in ancient Permian rocks of central Russia, uncovering what appears to be the teeth of an early mammal precursor with a skull half a meter long and what appears to be venomous ducts — a huge, poisonous mammal called Megawhaitsia patrichae.

Perhaps the least likely contender for a poisonous mammal, Pat herself has been described as the ‘honorary Mum and grandmother’ of countless children and graduate students who blossomed under her tutelage, one being former Greens candidate David Pollock, now 58, another the African lion conservationist Charlotte Read, aged 22. Such is the span of her influence across ages. David says Pat was instrumental in him studying zoology at Monash — ‘her vast knowledge and passion was infectious and she was hugely respected by students’ — and later standing for the Greens in the Northern Territory. Charlotte said the Monash Science Centre was like a ‘playground of scientific discovery for kids’. 

“I always learned so much when I visited with my brother; every day was something new and it inspired me to pursue a career in STEM,” said Charlotte. 

Pat says the voice for the Planet must come from educated kids. 

Pat grew up on a farm and was no stranger to hard work as a child. Her girlhood days began with milking the farm cow before dawn, picking cotton or grapes after school, and driving tractors from an early age. From this she believes firmly in hard work, education and having a meaningful purpose in life. If a Universal Basic Income were introduced, she believes people should be made to work for it. 

Her own heroes? She has pictures of two near her work desk at her home — Nelson Mandela and Derrimut, a tribal elder of the Boonwurrung clan of Melbourne who brokered peace in the 1800s with his friend, then mayor of Melbourne, John Pascoe Fawkner. 

“These men were all about peace,” says Pat. “Derrimut and Fawkner got together and said ‘let’s get along instead of fighting each other’ and it worked for a little while. As for Nelson Mandela, if he were alive today, I know he would strive to save the planet, and to equitably give people food and shelter. On top of this I would add access to medicine and policies to support community development and cohesion. This could be achieved in a 15 or 20 minute city concept but my preference would also be to embrace nature at the local level. I’m still a country girl at heart and that would be the start of my global utopian heaven.”

Whilst working at offices co-located with the Monash Science Centre, the author had the chance to meet Pat’s friend, David Attenborough, who asked him of his work on climate change: “Are you optimistic?” A decade later, I had the chance to ask this of Pat.

She replied: “I’m a fighter. And every time I have a chance to talk with people anywhere on the Planet, I keep that fire burning and I try to encourage young people to fight on to save our Planet — not fight wars.”

“I just wish we could change the minds of people like Putin and Trump, Netanyahu and those behind Hamas, people who are all about power. It’s tragic what is unfolding, sending their and other children to war.”

“A sustainable Heaven on Earth, to me, would be no fighting, enough food and shelter for smaller families to build strong communities, preferably among shared farms and native wildlife.”

“I like my current neighbourhood among the sheep and the kookaburras. I want children to grow up knowing this sort of environment, knowing their communities, loving nature and using their own observations to make decisions.”

Emerita Prof Patricia Vickers-Rich AO is a palaeobiologist and geologist who has studied the changing climate and its effect on biota over the past 600 million years. After a long tenure at Monash where she lectured in palaeontology in what is now the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, she also established the Monash Science Centre, which later moved to Swinburne, now called PrimeSci!, where she continues to inspire generations of young zoologists and conservationists.