Riversleigh, World Heritage Property, located in North-western Queensland, Australia, contains over 200 fossil bearing localities from the Oligo-Miocene. The study presented here aims at finding new methods to improve the accuracy of palaeoecological and biochronological studies and describe the palaeoenvironmental and chronological settings of the Riversleigh fossil deposits. One of the methods developed in this thesis, Minimum Sample Richness (MSR), determines the minimum number of species that must be present in a fauna to allow meaningful comparisons using multivariate analyses. Using MSR, several Riversleigh localities were selected for a palaeoecological study using the cenogram method to determine the palaeoenvironment during the Oligo-Miocene. Finally, the Numerical ages method was used to refine the relative ages of the Riversleigh localities and a re-diagnosis of the Riversleigh Systems is proposed.

Riversleigh, World Heritage Property, located in North-western Queensland, Australia, contains over 200 fossil bearing localities from the Oligo-Miocene. The study presented here aims at finding new methods to improve the accuracy of palaeoecological and biochronological studies and describe the palaeoenvironmental and chronological settings of the Riversleigh fossil deposits. One of the methods developed in this thesis, Minimum Sample Richness (MSR), determines the minimum number of species that must be present in a fauna to allow meaningful comparisons using multivariate analyses. Using MSR, several Riversleigh localities were selected for a palaeoecological study using the cenogram method to determine the palaeoenvironment during the Oligo-Miocene. Finally, the Numerical ages method was used to refine the relative ages of the Riversleigh localities and a re-diagnosis of the Riversleigh Systems is proposed.