Your Daily Fossil

Diprotodon - The Giant Wombat

Mounted specimen on display at the Melbourne Museum, Australia 

Reconstruction by Peter Trusler. 

When: Pleistocene (1.6 million to 46,000 years ago)

Where: Australia

What: Diprotodon is the biggest marsupial to have ever lived. The largest specimens found were roughly the size of an extant hippopotomus; 10 feet (3 meters) long, 6.5 feet (2 meters) tall at the shoulder, and with a weight estimate of over 6,000 lbs (over 2,500 kgs). They inhabited forests and grasslands in Australia, and were herbivores that had an extremely varied diet. There was not much that their large grinding cheek teeth could not process. There are multiple ‘bone-bed’ deposits containing almost nothing but Diprotodon skeletons, offering strong support that they also traveled in herds. Many of these deposits are reconstructed as deaths due to droughts; it took a lot of plant material to sustain a Diprotodon. They occupied  simular niches as large ungulate herds today on other continents. 

The closest living relatives of Diprotodon are koalas and wombats. This was the largest member of the apt named Australian mega-fauna. This giant animal and many other Australian mega-fauna went extinct shortly after the arrival of humans on the continent, in a mirror of the extinction of the North American mega-fauna 10,000 years ago. In both extinction events this colonization was accompanied by climate changes, leading to much debate as to how influential human habitation was on the loss of these forms. It is thought that Diprotodon and its close relatives may be the basis for the bunyip of aboriginal folklore.