New study describes semiarboreal kangaroo that lived 40,000 years ago in Australia. Apparently, even hopping can be boring.
According to the study, published this week in the Royal Society’s Open Science, the find came from fossils excavated decades ago from Mammo Western AustraliaNavan and the Thylacoleo Caves system. The skull, teeth, and skeleton two extinct marsupials originally identified as an Ice Age wallaby production, Wallabia kitcheneri. The researchers say they are physically different, however, and intostead distributes the fossils to the genus Congruus, formerly only used by a single fossil wallaby, Congruus congruus. They name the newly identified animal Congruus kitcheneri.
“This find is another reminder of how little we understand even of Australia’s recent geological history,” he said. “ said co-author Gavin Prideaux, a paleontologist at Flinders University in Australia, at Murdoch University press release.
Just as large patches of the northern hemisphere were covered in thousands of ice sheets during the Pleistocene, parts of Australia that are now overgrown were grassy and grassy. Thus, a palatable habitat for an animal that the authors of the study say was lus-lus fada.
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Many paleontological discoveries in Australia come from its cave networks, which offer lively looking into Pleistocene biodiversity. As the team differentiated this species through its cranial and dental features, they found evidence of its behavior from its inception.members. A humerus and ulna suggest that the animal was extremely muscular (there were big pecs), air a larger range of motion that allowed him to raise his arms above his head (think: have you ever seen a modern kangaroo surrender?), and you had big hands with big, bent claws. (Curvature in numbers is raised as an adjustment for inbound branches other species, also.)
“This is very interesting, not only in terms of unexpected tree climbing behavior in a large wallaby, but also because these samples come from an area that is now bare of trees, ”co – author Natalie Warburton, a paleontologist at Murdoch University in Perth, said in the same news. “The environment and the environment in the area was very different from what they are now, and perhaps different from what we have described before.”
O.marsupial fossils are found in Australian caves same point to aspirations of life (or at least food) above the ground. Marsupials generally have strong upper bodies, as the baby marsupials are like jelly, born less developed than other mammals, they have to climb into their parents ’pocket to continue the development. The recently described genre is the latest evidence of a marsupial permanent evolutionary commitment to his upper body.
Congruus kitcheneri it would not be the only kangaroo for tree climbing. The robe is carried today by all 14 species of exotic people tree kangaroo, which is similar to how they started an evolutionary joint venture with red pandas and lemurs. The fossil kangaroo developed the distinct tree climbing traits, the authors said, meaning that two groups of kangaroos learned how to climb independently.
The newly described species was only a half-tree and would have moved slowly through of the trees, according to the researchers. But for a creature five times larger than a live tree kangaroo, it is not a bad history at all.