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Abstract:

The Wellington Caves are about 8 km south of the town of Wellington, New South Wales. They were discovered in the 1820s and their long and varied history as a vertebrate palaeontological site began about 1830. Most of the early fossil collections were made by the explorer and surveyor-general, Major T.L. Mitchell, from an upper stratigraphic unit exposed in Mitchell's Cave and Cathedral Cave. Such venerable palaeontologists as Cuvier, Pentland, Jameson and Owen examined the material. Phosphate mining operations in the early 1900s exposed additional sedimentary sequences and most of the later vertebrate collections have come from these mines. A history of the discovery and exploration of the caves, as well as of the more important palaeontological aspects, is given by Lane and Richards (1963). A number of theories on the origin of the caves and especially on the depositional environment of the bone-bearing sediments, has been offered and some of these are summarised by Lane and Richards (1963). Most of these were conceived before 1900, none of them are detailed and they are generally speculations presented as minor portions of other articles dealing with a broader subject.