Sydney, Australia. Australian scientists have found the fossils of a rare opossum and a strange relative of the wombat, two unique and extinct marsupials believed to have roamed the Australian mainland 25 million years ago.
These fossil remains were discovered by a group of researchers from Flinders University during excavations carried out between 2020 and 2022 south of the city of Alice Spring, in the Australian desert center, the university reported in a statement.
The Flinders researchers stressed that this site, which dates to the late Oligocene, harbors the earliest known fossils of a certain type of now-extinct marsupials, whose physical characteristics were similar to their present-day relatives, as well as other rare extinct animals.
The extinct animals found in that site are the “Mukupirna fortidentata”, a wombat-like creature, and the “Chunia pledgei”, a distant relative of the current opossum, according to the study recently published in the scientific journal “Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology”. and in “Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology”.
“These curious beasts are members of a long-extinct lineage of marsupials, leaving no descendants,” said Arthur Crichton, a PhD candidate in paleontology from Flinders University who was involved in the discoveries.
“Learning regarding these animals helps put the surviving wombat and opossum groups into a larger evolutionary context,” Crichton added.
The scientists were able to determine, through the fossils of 35 specimens found at that site, that the “Mukupirna fortidentata” weighed around 50 kilograms and resembled a cross between a modern wombat and a marsupial lion (“Thylacoleo carnifex”).
This extinct animal, believed to be a branch of a wombat ancestor, had powerful jaws and large squirrel-like front teeth, enabling it to crush hard fruits, seeds and tubers, though its molars, by contrast, were It was similar to those of macaques.
For its part, the “Chunia pledgei” was a marsupial with many sharp teeth arranged like a “barcode”, which also served to crush food.
“Chunia pledgei had teeth that would be a dentist’s nightmare, with many crowns sitting right next to each other,” Chrichton said.