2012-10-12 10:41:53
Around 1830, the Scottish explorer Thomas Mitchell collected in the vicinity of the city of Wellington, in New South Wales, two fossil teeth, an incisor and a premolar. They were such extraordinary teeth that the famous English paleontologist Sir Richard Owen, creator of the term “dinosaur”, recognized the impossibility of determining the characteristics of the animal without having other elements. Later, Owen himself was able to examine two jaw fragments found in Queensland, from which he deduced that it was a carnivorous mammal, although without yet establishing its relationship with other mammals. In 1846, after receiving some skull and jaw fragments found a year earlier near Melbourne; Owen undertook an exhaustive anatomical study, comparing the available remains with a wide variety of mammals. This comparative study did not end until 1858, when Owen presented the results of his research to the Royal Society of London; It was, according to his conclusions, a new species of large marsupial carnivore, which he named Thylacoleo carnifex, “butcher marsupial lion”. Owen correctly surmised that the marsupial lion was more closely related to herbivorous marsupials such as wombats and koalas than to other carnivorous marsupials, such as the direwolf and the Tasmanian devil.
The strange anatomy of the marsupial lion, derived from the fact that it is a carnivore that descends from herbivorous ancestors, has given rise to the most diverse hypotheses about its way of life since its discovery. Although Owen was already clear that, as currently accepted, it was a predator, “one of the most ferocious and destructive”, in his own words, other researchers have proposed at different times that the marsupial lion was a scavenger, or that it it fed on crocodile eggs, pumpkins or hard-shelled fruits, or even used its teeth to tear the bark from cycad palms and eat its pith.
Many marsupial lion fossils have been discovered in caves and swamps throughout Australia and Tasmania, mostly skulls and jaws, but it was not until 1966 that a clear picture of the animal’s anatomy was available. That year an almost complete skeleton was found near Moree in New South Wales. In addition, it is possible that for a few years we have had a portrait of the marsupial lion. A rock painting discovered in June 2008 in northwestern Australia depicts a large cat-like animal with large claws. The first humans arrived in Australia some forty or fifty thousand years ago, when the marsupial lion was not yet extinct, and we know of no other Australian animal that matches the portrait these humans painted on the rock. But those same humans, together with the desertification of the continent caused by the last ice age, could also be responsible, at least in part, for their disappearance some thirty thousand years ago.
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