With an illustrious career defined by scientific discovery and collaboration, Professor Mike Archer is celebrated for his lasting impact on palaeontology across Australasia.
UNSW Sydney Professor Mike Archer is addicted to discovery. After decades of digging up the remains of hundreds of thousands of Australia's marsupial ancestors, the leading palaeontologist says he still chases the thrill.
"Palaeontology is addictive, there is no other way to describe it," Prof. Archer says. "There's no other job where you so regularly find the unexpected, and that's incredibly exciting and keeps me coming back.
"I am hooked on discovery."
The Australasian Palaeontologists (AAP) and the Australian Geological Society awarded Prof. Archer the 2025 Robert Etheridge Jr Medal . The award, which is the highest palaeontological honour bestowed by the AAP, was granted in honour of Prof. Archer's lifetime contribution to Australasian palaeontology.
The medal adds to his distinguished career that includes Fellowships of the Australian Academy of Science and the Royal Society of New South Wales, appointment as a Member of the Order of Australia and leadership roles as Director of the Australian Museum and Dean of UNSW Science.
Prof. Archer, who heads the Vertebrate Palaeontology Laboratory at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, says the honour is a privilege but not a solo achievement.
"To be recognised by an esteemed group who say our work has contributed significantly to understanding the geological underpinnings of Australia is very flattering," Prof. Archer says. "But an award like this can only be accepted on behalf of the hundreds of people who are involved in our work over many years."
Dean of UNSW Science, Scientia Professor Sven Rogge, congratulated Prof. Archer on the award.
"This award is a fitting tribute to Prof. Archer's remarkable and enduring contributions over an illustrious career," says Prof. Rogge. "His work has profoundly deepened our understanding of Australasian marsupials and helped preserve fossil sites and protect endangered living species.
"His prolific research output and dedication to mentoring generations of PhD students exemplify the very best of scientific excellence.
"He is, in every sense, a true scientist and a most deserving recipient of this prestigious honour."
A fascination with fossils
Prof. Archer was born in Australia but grew up in the United States in Pine Plains, New York, a small town of 500 people. At age 11, a discovery on the edge of town sparked his fascination with fossils.
"I was always fascinated with the natural world," Prof. Archer says. "I came across a boulder that had been torn up by a glacier from a rock deposit in Canada and dragged south into my backyard. When I looked closely, it was filled with fossils of the weirdest-looking animals I'd ever seen.
"I spent every afternoon after school, every weekend, with hammers and chisels, carefully taking that whole boulder apart and collecting all the strange little animals that were in it."
When he met a geologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History, Norman D. Newell, the young Mike Archer knew palaeontology was his calling.
"Norman wanted to know what I had in my suitcase, and when I opened it up and showed him, his eyes popped, because, as Dr Newell explained, the American Museum didn't have fossils of this age," Prof. Archer says. "It turns out the animals I had found in the boulder were Devonian fossils about 380 million years old.
"I used my next years' worth of allowance to buy the book Index Fossils of North America, and I was away."
Arriving back in Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship after studying palaeontology at Princeton University, Prof. Archer set about trying to uncover the deep-time history of Australia, which was still largely a mystery. He fell in love with what he found.
"I was expecting to spend only one year searching for some of the ancient mammals in Australia that would explain how, for example, koalas became koalas," Prof. Archer says. "I couldn't believe how fascinating everything was that turned up here, and as I began to uncover more and more, I fell in love with Australia."
Half a century of scientific discovery
Prof. Archer has been excavating at the World Heritage-listed Riversleigh Fossil Area, a remote place in north-west Queensland, for nearly half a century. During this time exploring the 40-square-kilometre site, he and a team of experts from UNSW and around the world have uncovered hundreds of thousands of creatures that once roamed the continent over the last 25 million years.
Ancient ancestors of the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), sequences of marsupial lions (including a tiny one named after Sir David Attenborough), marsupial sloths the team fondly calls ' drop bears ', along with tree-climbing crocodiles, flesh-eating kangaroos and an animal so strange it was named 'Thingodonta', are just a few of the quirky discoveries made at Riversleigh over the years.
Riversleigh Drop Bear skeleton. Karen Black
Fangaroo, one of the stranger fossil kangaroos from Riversleigh. Supplied
A subadult drop bear skull from Riversleigh. Supplied
Prof. Archer estimates that the Riversleigh deposits have been responsible for almost quadrupling the total number of older mammals known for the whole of Australia.
"It's a place where many urban myths about Australia have been coming to life," Prof. Archer says. "We've been going back there every year for almost 50 years, filling in the gaps in our understanding of mammal life over the last 25 million years with each new tooth, jaw and skeleton."
Prof. Archer's own eureka moment occurred in 1983 at one of the newly discovered Riversleigh sites. While standing on a seemingly ordinary rock, he looked down in amazement to see a mass of jaws and teeth of different kinds of mammals that had never been seen before just jutting out from its sides.
"I fell to my knees, shouting and excited because I quickly realised it wasn't just that rock - that rock was part of a whole pavement of multi-million-year-old treasures," Prof. Archer says. "When we processed that one rock that I'd been standing on in the lab back in UNSW, it revealed 34 different kinds of mammals, which at that point, doubled the total number of ancient mammals we knew about for the whole continent.
"That 1983 discovery was the beginning of thousands more, which ultimately led to World Heritage listing in 1994 of Riversleigh, along with Naracoorte Caves in South Australia, as the combined Australian Fossil Mammal Sites (Riversleigh/Naracoorte)."
Protecting pygmy-possums
Riversleigh's fossils are crucial for understanding how Australia became the continent we know today. They trace the story of mammal evolution in Australia and may even guide efforts to help species survive modern threats like climate change.
"One of the understandings that sank in early was the intimate relationship between the past and the present," Prof. Archer says. "We've been using the fossil record as we begin to fill in a lot of the gaps to draw lines through time, from the past into the present, which helps us understand how the animals of today became the way we see them.
"But that line can also then be drawn forward as a prediction into the future based on how individual groups of animals have been changing over millions of years."
One example of utilising deep time history to help conserve critically endangered animals is Prof. Archer's work with the mountain pygmy-possum, which inhabits the alpine zones of New South Wales and Victoria and is facing extinction due to climate change. Prof. Archer and his colleagues have examined the ancient environments where the ancestors of these tiny animals lived to discover that their ancestors have been most comfortable in lowland wet forests - not cold, inhospitable alpine zones.
With fewer than 3000 pygmy-possums estimated to be left in the wild, the team helped develop a breeding facility at Secret Creek Sanctuary in Lithgow in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales. As predicted, the pygmy-possums have acclimated to their new non-alpine home, found other food sources and have begun reproducing.
"It looked like only a matter of time before we were going to have to write the mountain pygmy-possum off as a casualty of climate change in Australia," Prof. Archer says. "But what we found in the fossil record gave new insights into a way in which we could better conserve this critically endangered species.
"If we can give them a helping hand to move out of the Alpine zone and down into lowland forests, it will give them a chance to not only survive, but thrive, and that's what we're doing."
Prof. Archer's other conservation research interests include keeping native animals, such as quolls, as pets. He has also been involved in de-extinction research, which aims to revive species, including the thylacine and gastric-brooding frog.
A fossil family tree
Prof. Archer's passion for palaeontology is also a family affair. He gives a lot of credit for his career to his partner, fellow palaeontologist and UNSW Emeritus Professor Sue Hand .
"A lot of our discussions are not the usual ones you find in a household," Prof. Archer says. "They're more often about paleontological mysteries and problems we're jointly trying to solve working with UNSW colleagues, including Dr Anna Gillespie, Dr Troy Myers, Dr Ian Graham, Dr Blake Dickson and our equally addicted research students.
"Just recently, Sue produced microCT images and drawings of a new bizarre fossil mammal turned up by former PhD student Dr Elizabeth Smith and her daughter Clytie from a 100-million-year-old fossil deposit at Lightning Ridge."
There is an ever-expanding group of coworkers and colleagues whom the professors regard as their intellectual family. Prof. Archer has supervised/co-supervised over 90 research students and published more than 400 scientific papers and books in collaboration with researchers from around the world.
"I like to think that we've got many times more science 'offspring' than our own biological kids, and we're very proud of them all," Prof. Archer says. "They spent years developing their professional skills with us here at UNSW and then went on to develop spectacular careers as global experts and in many cases fostering armies of students of their own - our scientific 'grandchildren'.
"We spend a lot of our time corresponding with them all over the world when new things turn up in the fossil deposits we're exploring, often continuing to be coauthors on new papers decades after they were students here in UNSW."
For Prof. Archer, the thrill of discovery is matched by the joy of sharing those moments with a passionate team and introducing new students to the excitement and importance of palaeontology.
"It's the best job in the world being a scientist, and one of the most thrilling feelings is making discoveries," Prof. Archer says. "Especially with all the wonderful people working with us every day, it makes life very fulfilling."
An exhibition ' Revealing Riversleigh ' showcasing the research and discoveries from the Riversleigh World Heritage Area will be open to the public at UNSW Library from 29 September.
