'Mega-wombat' unearthed in Australia

'Mega-wombat' unearthed in Australia

The fossil of a car sized mega-wombat has been unearthed in northern Australia, scientists say - the most complete skeleton of its kind.

Weighing in at a whopping three tonnes, the herbivorous diprotodon was the largest marsupial to roam the earth and lived between 2 million and 50,000 years ago.

A relative of the modern-day wombat, the diprotodon skeleton was dug up in remote Queensland last week - the most northerly specimen ever discovered - and scientists believe it could shed valuable light on the species' demise.

Along with Australia's other megafauna, which included towering kangaroos and gigantic crocodiles, diprotodon became extinct around the same time that indigenous tribes first appeared and debate has raged about the role of humans.

"There's been a lot of debate about what killed the megafauna and it's quite a hot topic in paleontology," Sue Hand, a professor on the team that made the discovery, told AFP.


Professor Hand's fossil, the most complete diprotodon found in Australia, was well preserved and could be quite accurately dated, offering valuable insights into the role of humans and climate change in its demise, she said.

"Dating has been one of the bugbears of trying to unravel what happened," she said.


The animal was two metres tall and 3.5 metres long, and was the size of a rhinoceros or a car, pigeon-toed and with a backward-facing pouch, she said.

"They basically looked a lot like a wombat, a very big beefed-up wombat, much bigger than obviously anything that's around today," she said.

Megafauna are thought to have evolved to such large sizes to cope with inhospitable climates and food scarcity, with fossils found in Australia of prehistoric emus, tree-dwelling crocodiles and carnivorous kangaroos.


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