FROM $350pp
TWIN SHARE
BOOKINGS ESSENTIAL
To include a Nilpena Ediacara extended Fossil Tour with a stay at the Prairie Outback Lodge, please book here and select the tour as an extra when completing your booking.
The Prairie Hotel is an oasis of warm hospitality, elegant country style, memorable dining and house brewed beers in South Australia's Flinders Ranges. The Outback Lodge is a private haven within the Prairie Hotel. It is an intimate retreat of just 12 elegantly styled ‘country chic’ rooms with private lounge and courtyard areas for your exclusive use. Choose from their recently renovated Heritage, Outback and Flinders rooms and a range of packages including a variety of dining options. Treat yourself to a stay in this iconic Flinders Ranges accommodation, the closest Flinders Ranges accommodation to the Nilpena-Ediacara National Park.
Including the Ediacara Fossil Tour with your accommodation booking, you will experience the earliest evidence of complex multicellular life on earth, with Nilpena Station pastoralist Ross Fargher, who discovered the Nilpena fossils in 1986.
The most intact and significant Ediacara fossil beds in the world, they are crucial to understanding the evolution of animal life on earth. Subject of Sir David Attenborough’s ‘Life on Earth’, with funding by NASA to ongoing research, and as the cornerstone of the SA Government’s 2018 nomination of The Flinders Ranges for World Heritage Listing, the significance of the Nilpena Ediacara Fossil Fields is extraordinary!
Discover a new perspective through which to view the world. 550 million years ago the Flinders Ranges were a shallow tropical sea straddling the equator. With photosynthesis and rise of oxygen levels, animal life exploded. Evidence of these soft bodied creatures was first discovered in the Ediacara Hills, north of Nilpena, by Reg Sprigg. They were officially acknowledged and recorded as the Ediacara Biota in 2004.
Ross and Jane Fargher demonstrated their commitment to respectful research, perpetual care and protection of the fossil fields by surrendering two thirds (600sq kms) of their Nilpena pastoral lease to National Parks in 2019.