Cuddie Springs is a notable archaeological and paleontological site in the semi-arid zone of central northern New South Wales, Australia, near Carinda in Walgett Shire. Cuddie Springs is an open site, with the fossil deposits preserved in a claypan on the floor of an ancient ephemeral lake. The claypan fills with water after local rainstorms and often takes months to dry, a fact which facilitated the survival of fossils over a long period of time. The site provided the first unequivocal association of stone artefacts with fossil remains of Australian megafauna. Cuddie Springs has been known as a fossil megafauna locality since the late 1870s, when a well was sunk into the centre of the claypan. The Australian Museum launched excavations in 1933 and while many bones were found, no archaeological discoveries were made in that initial research. More extensive excavations were conducted between 1991 and 1996 by a team from the University of New South Wales and were continued between 1997 and 2009 through the University of Sydney. Etymology It was recorded that the word 'Cuddy' in the language of the "Marra Blacks" means bad. This has been interpreted as a reference to the quality of the water found in the Cuddie lake, which is alkaline with a pH between 7 and 9. Despite the name, Cuddie Springs is an ephemeral lake, and not a spring. Excavation history In the historic period, Cuddie Springs was known to both Aboriginal and European people as a palaeontological site. A Dreaming story about Mullyan the eaglehawk is associated to the formation of the bone deposits at the site and the formation of the Macquarie Marshes to the south and the site is also part of a Dreaming track tied to the Macquarie Marshes and the Geera waterhole on the Barwon River. Europeans first settled in the area around Cuddie Springs in the 1830s. A well was sunk into the middle of the claypan in 1876, the disused superstructure of which was still present in the 1920s. During the sinking of the well in the 1870s several large fossilised bones were recovered and were sent to the Australian Museum, some of which were later sent to Richard Owen who identified the fossils as belonging to different genus of Diprotodon, Euowenia, Nototherium, Genyornis, various Macropodidae, Megalania and at least one genus of crocodile, Pallimnarchus. Despite attempts in the 1920s to excavate it was not