AS a kid living in Wangi Wangi, Matt McCurry was surrounded by the natural world.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
“We’d feed eels in the lake, there were dolphins,” he recalled. “I grew up in a really natural setting.”
That upbringing helped shape the scientist he would become. Only Matt McCurry studies not living creatures but long-dead ones, to better understand “worlds that don’t exist anymore”.
He is a palaeontologist at the Australian Museum.
In some ways, Dr McCurry has come full circle; his interest in science and nature was stoked by childhood visits to the museum in Sydney. But his love of fossils was fired while studying for his science degree at the University of Newcastle.
The 28-year-old studied for his PhD at Monash University in Victoria and worked for a year at the renowned Smithsonian Institution in the United States, before taking up his role as Curator of Palaeontology at the Australian Museum about two months ago.
For someone fascinated by ancient life, his timing could not have been better. From Saturday, the museum is staging an exhibition, “Mammoths. Giants of the Ice Age”.
The star exhibit is a preserved baby woolly mammoth retrieved from the permafrost in Siberia in 2007. Named Lyuba by scientists, the body of the 42,000-year-old mammoth has journeyed from a museum in Russia to Sydney.
Dr McCurry was there when Lyuba’s body was brought into the Australian Museum, and it was “an awe-inspiring moment”.
“It’s one of the most remarkable exhibits I’ve ever seen,” he said. “The skin, the muscles, the trunk are so intact.”
Scientists have been able to learn a lot about the baby mammoth. A scan detected mud trapped in her airway, suggesting she drowned while trying to cross a river.
Lyuba has also provided more insights into these massive herbivores and why they became extinct. One reason may have been the same as why the body of Lyuba could be unearthed from the melting permafrost: climate change.
As for the sightings of another ancient creature – the great white shark – in waters near his childhood home, Dr McCurry said he was unlikely to study that, “not unless it turns into a fossil”.