ABC in Australia has an intriguing story about the latest beer craze in Australia. Shale ale is from Kangaroo Island, which is famous for Cambrian Era fossil lagerstatten. Emu Bay is the famous fossil locality. The beer was created to celebrate the discoveries on the island.
Kangaroo Island brewer Mike Holden is set to release a 'shale ale' beer, commemorating 10 years of fossil research on the South Australian island.
Mr Holden said the ale was filtered through fossil-rich shale that was more than half a billion years old.
"We just thought for this one, why not let the millions of years of shale rock speak for itself and see what comes through?" he said.
"The beer definitely has a unique flavour to it, but it is not something that is off-putting or maybe something that people will not even recognise."
Kangaroo Island is known as prime hunting ground for palaeontologists, with researchers finding 500-million-year-old "alien-looking" fossils in 2014.
This year marks a decade of fossil digging at the island's Emu Bay for University of New England professor John Paterson and his University of Adelaide colleague Diego Garcia-Bellido.
Over the past 10 years, it is estimated the team has collected about 6,000 specimens for the South Australian Museum.
Professor Paterson said the shale used as part of the brew was estimated to be about 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," he said.
"We get very fine preservation, even down to finding muscle tissues and the lenses within the eyes of some of these strange arthropod creatures."
