A 650-million-year-old reef, ten times higher than the Great Barrier Reef, has been discovered in the Australian Outback. Scientists believe that the reef, the only one of its age in the world, may hold evidence of the earliest examples of primitive animal life.

It was discovered in the northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia by three scientists from Melbourne. It existed for five to ten million years in a tropical period between two Ice Ages. The next closest-aged series of reefs, about 800 million years old, is in Arctic Canada.

The scientists, from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, said that the reef could also explain the extent of climate change in the early history of Earth.

“Some of the complex organisms we have seen in the reef have never been discovered previously,” Malcolm Wallace, an associate professor, told The Times. “There is nothing like these fossils in any modern setting but they have structures that are similar to some animals.”

The oldest-known animal fossils are 570 million years old. The reef in the Flinders Ranges is 80 million years older than that and was, he said, “the right age to capture the precursors to animals”.

The Flinders Ranges, the largest mountain range in Australia, are renowned worldwide for the window that they provide to Earth’s past. At the time that the reef was formed, the eastern part of Australia, from the Ranges to the eastern seaboard, was still under the ocean.

“With the movement over millions of years on Australia’s tectonic plates, the reef has been turned 90 degrees skywards from its once horizontal position,” Jonathan Giddings, a colleague of Professor Wallace, said. “These tectonic forces have resulted in very ancient history being pushed up to the present.

“Today’s advances in satellite imagery are helping us to see the reef very easily. Geologists had seen this mass before but had not really recognised it as being once a reef,” he said.

Unlike the Great Barrier Reef, the Oodnaminta Reef – named after an old hut near by – is not made of coral. “This reef is much too old to be made of coral,” Professor Wallace said. “It was constructed by microbial organisms and other complex, chambered structures that have not been discovered before.”

Coral was first formed 520 million years ago, more than 100 million years after the Oodnaminta was formed.

The escarpment of the reef would have been 1,100m (3,600ft) at its highest point, ten times higher than the 100m escarpment of the Great Barrier. The section of the reef that has been preserved is 20km (12 miles) wide but there is evidence that it extended across about 100km. The Great Barrier Reef stretches for 2,600km.

“The whole section can be driven or walked along, which makes it extremely easy for scientists to travel back through its five to ten-million-year history in the space of minutes,” Professor Wallace said.

The scientists said the reef showed that the ocean was relatively stagnant at the time and was trapping carbon monoxide in its depths rather than releasing it into the atmosphere.

“This could have had a dramatic effect on the climate,” Professor Wallace said. “It would help explain why there was such extreme climate change at that time.”

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