Thylacoleo

We do, of course, have a history of another kind of lion in Australia.

Thylacoleo, the marsupial lion.

And my next Oxford Pest graduate, also keen on Australia, is Adam Lindholm.

He wonders why we have so few big mammalian carnivores in Australia.

We find nice little bits of smaller, more recent animals, but it points to the issues of biases in the fossil record that I look at more broadly.

Well, I think my very favorite is Megalania, this varinus priscus, this seven-meter-long Komodo dragon that I think is probably one of the most terrifying animals to exist on the planet.

And then you have Thylacoleo, the marsupial lion, sort of killer koala.

I used to call it Thylacoleo.

But I do remember there not being much evidence that it was a real animal.

Some people think the Queensland tiger is a descendant of an extinct animal called Thylacoleo, while the Beast of Buderim is supposed to be a thylacine.

Thylacoleo is sometimes called the marsupial lion, although it looked much different than a lion.

It had a strong kangaroo-like tail that it could use as a balance to help it stand on its hind legs.

Its front legs were extremely strong, and it actually had a semi-opposable thumb that helped it grab onto prey.

Its front claws were retractable like a cat's claws, too, an excellent example of convergent evolution.

All these traits also meant that Thylacoleo could climb extremely well.

It might not have been a very fast runner, though, and some researchers think it was an ambush predator, possibly dropping down from trees onto its prey.

Exactly.

You can trace the gradual evolution of modern kangaroos right alongside terrifying extinct oddities like giant flightless thunderbirds and the marsupial lion Thylacoleo.

So Riversleigh gives us this beautiful continuous story of relatively recent mammalian evolution.

But the other site in Australia goes way deeper into time, right?