The animal would have been about the size of a bear, with teeth that suggest a plant-based diet and powerful limbs for digging.
Peter Schouten
There is a lot to love about wombats. They are robust creatures, runners surprisingly fast for their size, and, believe it or not, they poop in buckets. Literal cubes. But that is not all that is interesting about them, they also have a vast history.
In a new study, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of international paleontologists detailed their discovery of a partial animal skull, more than four times the size of any living wombat today.
The fossil, originally unearthed in 1973 in Pinpa Lake, a remote and dry salty lake in South Australia, has been attributed to an ancestor of the common wombat of the Oligocene era, albeit with characteristics different enough to earn its own marsupial. family classification
Mike Archer, a professor at UNSW Science and co-author of the article, said in a press release that due to the animal being boxed in clay, they were unsure what it was when they first examined it.
“We found it by probing the flat, dry surface of the lake with a thin metal pole, such as acupuncturing the skin of Mother Earth. We only dug down into the clay if the pole contacted something hard below the surface, and in this case it turned out to be the articulated skeleton of a more mysterious new creature. “
Bent Mukupirna, which means “big bones” in the Dieri and Malyangapa languages spoken by indigenous Australians, the remains of the skeleton indicate that the animal would be about the size of a bear, with teeth that suggest a plant-based diet and powerful limbs to dig. However, the study authors suggest that it may not have been the burrow type, like contemporary wombats.
According to Robin Beck, co-author of the article, “Mukupirna was clearly an impressive and powerful beast, at least three times bigger than modern wombats.”
“Koalas and wombats are amazing animals,” he said, “but animals like it. Mukupirna they show that their extinct relatives were even more extraordinary and many of them were giants. “
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