Agence France-PresseMar 25, 2021 11:44:59 IST
The most amazing thing about the almost perfect fossils was that they belonged to 40-kilo kangaroos that secretly came to climb trees, although that was amazing enough. What is true of palaeontologists is that the Nullarbor Plain in southwestern Australia, the site of the find, is a treeless shrub and was thought to be so even when the newly named Congruus kitcheneri jumped – and, apparently, he climbed – over his fields about 50,000 years ago. The name is derived from Latin in its entirety: “Null” for “none”, and “arbor” for “tree”.
Researchers had two full skeletons to work with – one male, one female,
The bare, snail – shaped area – 1,100 kilometers (700 miles) from head to tail – is even fortified with road signs that say, in all major letters, “TREELESS PLANE END”.
“I remember looking at the bones on the hands and feet with their big, bent claws and saying to my colleague, ‘Maybe you’re not going to believe me, but I’m thought it was a tree climb! ‘”Recalled Natalie Warburton, a researcher at the Center for Climate-Related Terrestrial Ecosystems at Murdoch University in Perth.
The “quite unexpected” tree climbing behavior, described Wednesday in the magazine Royal Society Open Science, certainly important, she said AFP.
With the exception of distant cousins in the tropical canopy of New Guinea, the family contains 60-plus species of kangaroos, wallabies and other marsupials in the family. macropodidae – all descendants living in trees, possum-like ancestors – have long since come to make their way on terra firma.
Totally inappropriate
But the finding, Warburton added, “also tells us that the environment and the environment in the area over the last 50,000 to 100,000 years was very different from what it is now, and perhaps inter- different from what we would have described previously for that period based on geological and botanical evidence “.
The fossils, as a whole, are “completely unsuitable” with expected behavior and ecology.
Firmly speaking, Warburton and her colleague Gavin Prideaux, a palaeontologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, were not the first fossil hunters to discover this oddball roo.
But the earlier sample of the same species was incorrectly included in taxonomic brackets based on a few partial teeth and a high jaw fragment.
With two full-fledged skeletons to work with – one male, one female – Warburton and Prideaux were able to reclassify what was Wallabia kitcheneri as Congruus kitcheneri, a sub-genus hitherto used by one species, which also became extinct.
It is not known exactly what pushed these giant creatures to develop arboreal skills.
“Climbing trees required a lot of energy and huge muscles to build itself,” Warburton said.
Menagerie de megafauna
“There must have been some good food facilities in the trees to make that worthwhile.”
The fossils appeared in Thylacoleo Caves, named after lion-like marsupial carnivores that roamed the region for nearly two million years until they became extinct at the same time as the kangaroo that was tree climbing.
It is just because of a heated debate that megaageruna that inhabited Australia’s sunny landscape – including giant witches, one-ton marsupials and croc-sized berries – almost died at at the same time.
For a long time, major change in climate was thought to be the main culprit, but more recent research monitoring the movement of people early across the continent shows that they are to blame.
The Nullarbor Plain – which once had a summer-like climate, daytime temperatures in summer near 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), and winter nights that can fall well below frost. used by Indigenous Australians.
Typical mammals include the southern hairy chestnut, which provides shelter from the hot sun by digging into the sand, as well as red kangaroos and dingoes.