Johannesburg - If it was smaller, it might have been labelled cute, maybe even cuddly, a prehistoric hamster lookalike.
But weighing in at 3 tons, our ancestors probably kept a safe distance from this beast.
The 2m-long diprotodon (meaning two forward teeth) roamed Australia about 40 000 years ago, nibbling on shrubs and living in small herds.
Not much is known about this ancient marsupial, but the chance discovery of a giant leg bone found on a remote cattle station in Australia is about to change that.
Former Wits University palaeontologist Dr Adam Yates will be a part of the team that, next month, will excavate the site where the bone was recovered.
It’s a race against time, as the bones lie in a dried river bed and Yates and his colleagues want to remove the fossils before the monsoon rains arrive.
They are hoping to find a full skeleton, and if they are lucky, evidence to solve the mystery of the giant’s disappearance from the landscape.
The large leg bone was discovered by the manager of the cattle station, near the northern Australian city of Darwin. “He took snaps of the bone and sent them to the museum. It was initially thought that it was part of a horse or water buffalo. But when he bought it into the museum, we immediately recognised that this was something special,” said Yates, who is the senior curator of earth sciences at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territories.
What made the discovery special, according to Yates, was that diprotodon fossils had never been found so far north.
No one is sure why diprotodon died out. One controversial theory is that they were wiped out by early Australian hunters.
The controversy surrounding this theory is that early Australians are seen as having lived in harmony with the environment.
Yates believes diprotodon probably had a low reproduction rate and that the hunting of even a few individuals would have had a catastrophic effect on their population. - The Star