Name: One skink, two skink, big skink, blue skink – A fossil history of iconic Australian reptiles
Start: 2026-06-05T19:30:00+08:00
End: 2026-06-05T21:30:00+08:00
Location: Hew Roberts Lecture Theatre (UWA Nedlands)

$One skink, two skink, big skink, blue skink \u2013 A fossil history of iconic Australian reptiles$

Kailah Thorn is the WA Museum Collections Manager for Herpetology and crawls through Western Australian caves searching for recently extinct reptiles. She specialises in Australian reptile fossils that are less than 66 million years old (from the Cenozoic) and has described Australia’s oldest skink (Proegernia mikebulli), deciphered when the first true bluetongue lizard evolved, and assembled the largest skink on earth: Tiliqua frangens.
Fossils from across the country can help us answer big questions and even reveal spiky surprises — like a bobtail lizard as long as your arm, weighing 1,000 times more than a garden skink, and covered in spiked, armoured plating! Fossils extend our expectations of what animals look like, where they live, where they’ve come from and what might have brought about their extinction. This talk will dive deep into the fossil history of Australia’s most diverse vertebrate family, Scincidae: when did they get here and what’s happened to them since?
There will be a focus talk on Tasmanian flora and fauna from Tanya Marwood.
Image: Kailah Thorn in Horseshoe Cave