Giant Prehistoric Wombat Discovered
If you’ve never heard of a wombat, try to imagine an enormous mouse-rat looking thing about 1 meter in length. This marsupial mammal lives in Australia and is pretty cute to boot. But imagine one of these guys being 2 meters tall and 3 meters long!
That’s what paleontologists are estimating from a huge giant wombat jawbone discovered down under last Friday. See a picture of the modern variant on the right and read the story after the jump…
Scientists in Australia announced Friday they had found the jawbone of a giant wombat the size of a large car that lived 20,000-40,000 years ago.
The jawbone of the ancient marsupial, part of the "mega-fauna" that once roamed pre-historic Australia, was found by a tour guide at the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
The animal, named the diprotodon, was two metres (6.5 feet) tall and three metres (10 feet) long, weighing about three tonnes.
By comparison, modern wombats are about one metre (three feet) long, 25 centimetres (10 inches) high and weigh 20-45 kilogrammes (44-100 pounds).
University of New South Wales palaeontologist Michael Archer said the discovery, the first so close to Sydney, could herald a major scientific site at the Jenolan Caves.
"If there’s one jaw, there has to be more material and it could theoretically be on the edge of the beginning of a very large deposit and this is the first bit poking out of the wall and that there are some really fascinating mega-fauna fossils in this cave," he said.
source Tags: dumb news, giant wombat, australia, paleontology, evolution
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