Retired Australian teacher discovers the oldest fossil of its kind in southern hemisphere – and a new species

Robert Beattie, 82, has found specimens of a 151m-year-old midge that challenge what we know about how the insects evolved

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As a boy, holidaying with his family in the New South Wales coastal town of Gerringong, Robert Beattie found a shell in a rock. It turned out to be hundreds of millions of years old - a Permian fossil, common to the Sydney basin.

I couldn't believe it," Beattie recalls. I've been interested in fossils ever since." That childhood discovery, made in 1948, sparked a lifelong passion for palaeontology, one that that has taken him to dig sites across Australia's eastern states, seen him present his findings internationally - and discover a fossil that changes what we know about how insects evolved.