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Wednesday, July 6, 2011
They’re muscular, have powerful claws, chew with rodent-like teeth, and now it turns out they have a more than 6,000-pound ancestor. I don’t know much scarier a prehistoric animal can get.
When paleontologists found the first fully intact skeleton of a wombat on a cattle farm in northern Queensland this week, it showed that the marsupial, which has inhabited Australia for two million years, once weighed as much as 6,614 pounds. The animal would have stood about 6 feet 6 inches at the shoulder and was nearly 10 feet long, making it the largest marsupial that ever lived and the size of a large SUV.
Australia is home to other bizarre prehistoric animals, including a marsupial lion, a mammalian woodpecker, a tree-dwelling crocodile, a carnivorous kangaroo rat, and a tube-nosed bandicoot, but none so terrifying as the giant wombat.
When paleontologists found the first fully intact skeleton of a wombat on a cattle farm in northern Queensland this week, it showed that the marsupial, which has inhabited Australia for two million years, once weighed as much as 6,614 pounds. The animal would have stood about 6 feet 6 inches at the shoulder and was nearly 10 feet long, making it the largest marsupial that ever lived and the size of a large SUV.
Australia is home to other bizarre prehistoric animals, including a marsupial lion, a mammalian woodpecker, a tree-dwelling crocodile, a carnivorous kangaroo rat, and a tube-nosed bandicoot, but none so terrifying as the giant wombat.
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