Free Republic

As sabre tooth tigers and woolly mammoths were wandering around Europe, unique, giant prehistoric animals were living in Australia -- three metre tall kangaroos and wombat-like creatures, the size of a four-wheel drive, were just some of the curious creatures Down Under. Yet mysteriously, sometime during the last 100,000 years, they disappeared forever. The extinction of these giant animals, known as megafauna, has generated great debate. One group advocates "human blitzkrieg" -- those asserting the first Australians hunted these beasts to extinction. Others, myself included, find there is too little evidence to confidently attribute responsibility to any particular factor. Nonetheless,...

Australian scientists yesterday unveiled the biggest-ever graveyard of an ancient rhino-sized mega-wombat called diprotodon, with the site potentially holding valuable clues on the species’ extinction. The remote fossil deposit in outback Queensland state is thought to contain up to 50 diprotodon skeletons including a huge specimen named Kenny, whose jawbone alone is 70cm long. Lead scientist on the dig, Scott Hocknull from the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, said Kenny was one of the largest diprotodons he had ever seen and one of the best preserved specimens. Pigeon-toed and with a backward-facing pouch large enough to carry an adult human, Hocknull...

Ice Age Marsupial Topped Three Tons, Scientists Say John Pickrell in England for National Geographic News October 17, 2003 A giant, wombat-like marsupial that roamed Ice Age Australia, may have been much bigger than experts previously believed. The beast, known as Diprotodon optatum, may have been larger than all but the biggest hippopotamus or rhinoceros, according to the first rigorous experimental estimate of its bulk by scientists in Sydney, Australia. Experts now believe that Diprotodon weighed in at a whopping 6,142 pounds (2,786 kilograms), or nearly 32 times as heavy as the largest marsupial alive today, the red kangaroo (Macropus...