From inside an old safe in the Australian Museum in Sydney, palaeontologist Tim Flannery carefully removes a shoe-box-sized container and places it on a table. Inside are more boxes and containers, like a Russian doll.
Once the contents are fully revealed and spread out, there are nine tiny fragments of fossilised jawbones. If Flannery and his colleagues are right, before us is a glimpse into a lost world – a previously unknown chapter of mammal…