CANBERRA, Sept. 22 (Xinhua) -- A South Australian brewer has announced he will release a "fossil beer" to commemorate 10 years of regional fossil research.
Mike Holden, an independent brewer based on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, said the ale was filtered through fossil-rich shale, a type of sedimentary rock dating back more than 500 million years.
"We just thought for this one, why not let the millions of years of shale rock speak for itself and see what comes through?" Holden told Australian media on Friday.
"The beer definitely has a unique flavor to it, but it is not something that is off-putting or maybe something that people will not even recognize."
Kangaroo Island, a third of which is protected nature reserves, has been identified as something of a "hotspot" for palaeontologists with researchers from the University of New England collecting 6,000 specimens from the island since 2007.
In 2014, the island made international headlines when "alien-looking" fossils from 500 million years ago were uncovered.
John Paterson, leader of the University of New England's dig on the island, said that the shale used in brewing the beer was around 514 million years old.
"They are from a very special time in Earth's history called the Cambrian ... this is when we started to see the first marine animals appearing on Earth," Paterson said.
"What we are digging up is some of the oldest marine animals on the planet.
"We get very fine preservation, even down to finding muscle tissues and the lenses within the eyes of some of these strange arthropod creatures."
Holden said that innovation was necessary in Australia's competitive craft beer industry with an estimated 400 independent brewers now operating in the country.
"People enjoy the story of beer," he said.
"We have always tried to make sure there is a link in our beers to where we are.
"The story is there, and people can either choose to just drink a beer like it is anything else, or get involved and learn something about it as well."
