Mega-marsupials found in Australia

[jcaffoe]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/01/25/australia.fossils.reut/index.html

Marsupial lions, kangaroos as tall as trucks and wombats the size of a rhinoceros roamed Australia's outback before being killed off by fires lit by arriving humans, scientists said on Thursday.

[LaPalida]

That's crazy... you know I was thinking. We have so many crazy animal threads in the lounge... maybe we should make another forum for this? I dunno. It's really neat stuff but it gets lost after a while.

[woodbert]

Humans being responsible for the death of an entire species... impossible:tihi:

Cool article.

[dfacto]

We suck. We killed off all the cool animals, and now the best we've got is the elephant and rhino. Lame.

I want my woolly mammoths and dire wolves damnit.

[Tully]

We just think these animals are so much more awesome because they're new to us :P Guaranteed if those guys were still around and we didn't know about elephants and rhinos, we'd be saying "aww, we just have big wombats and kangaroos around... why can't we have elephants and rhinos?"

All the same, these things were obviously super cool :P

[dfacto]

Well, if they were around we'd be pining for the dinosaurs, but either way we'd have megafauna.

Imagine how cool it would have been if people had used war wombats instead of war elephants. :D

[Rhynome]

The thought of ferocious hunter wombats just made me giggle like a loon.
http://www.thingsthatmakeyougoaahh.com/images/208-P3220065.jpg
http://www.ruthgumbau.com/global/uploaded_images/wombat-702756.jpg

RAWR!

[magicgoo]

Look at the size OF HIS PACKAGE!!!!

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2007/TECH/science/01/25/australia.fossils.reut/story.kangaroo.gi.jpg

Sorry, I got distracted by the article's photo for a second ;P Yeah, everything used to be so big and huge. I wish gigantic creatures still roamed the earth. It's sad how everything keeps shrinking.

[Rhynome]

Look at the size OF HIS PACKAGE!!!!

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2007/TECH/science/01/25/australia.fossils.reut/story.kangaroo.gi.jpg
It's sad how everything keeps shrinking.

The Kangaroos share your sentiment.

[JAG.]

ive often wondered.. with all the dna recreating/cloning stuff goin on, if some dousche is gonna get the bright idea to restructure one of these extinct animals or something... i sure would like to see huge wombats and kangaroos though - JAG

[Tully]

Why does wanting to clone one of these things make somebody a douche? Seems a pretty cool (if not particularly useful) thing to do. Cloning recently extinct animals like the thylecine or the dodo would seem more useful and more feasible, since we'd be able to put them back in their original environments, in theory. DNA is pretty a moderately resiliant molecule, but it will break down eventually. Couple thousand years max, I've heard, depending on the conditions. It isn't recoverable from fossils generally, so I don't think they'd be able to clone these animals.

I've heard a theory that suggests fauna don't tend to be as large as they used to be millions of years ago because there's less oxygen in the atmosphere. If somebody cloned a dinosaur today, it would probably need to be kept in an insular super-oxygenated environment because it wouldn't be efficient enough at processing today's air to get enough oxygen to live. This theory was backed up by testing the air in bubbles of amber. I dunno where giant wombats and kangaroos come in since they didn't live that long ago ... maybe they went extinct because of climate change and/or pressures from new species. Just weren't enough resources for them to have stuck it out.

[dfacto]

There are indications that human hunting and human initiated environmental changes (like aborigines burning Australia until the big guys couldn't hack it) killed lots of the mega-fauna.

And we're finishing the job with elephants, rhinos, and giraffes.