Kangaroo Carnivore, "Duck Of Doom" Among Australian Fossil Finds - ENN

[hatrack]

SYDNEY, Australia — Before there were cuddly koalas, hoards of flesh-eating kangaroos, "demon ducks," and marsupial lions roamed Australia's Outback, according to recent fossil discoveries by paleontologists.

A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales working in the eastern state of Queensland made the discoveries in three new fossil deposits during a recent two-week dig. Many of the fossils are older than 24 million years; one of the deposits is thought to contain fossils up to 500 million years old, according to Prof. Mike Archer, the university's dean of science.

A saber-toothed kangaroo and a giant 10-foot-tall, 881-pound bird scientists nicknamed the "demon duck of doom" were among the largely unknown species uncovered in the dig, Archer told reporters Wednesday.

"They were galloping kangaroos, they didn't hop," Archer said. "They were also far more muscly than the kangaroos we know, with sharp saber-like incisors and powerful forelimbs to help rip and tear their prey." The remains of ancient tree-climbing crocodiles and marsupial lions were also uncovered in the rocks.


EDIT

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=10862

[slackmaster]

1. QUACK!

:nuke:

[havocmom]

2. .

[n2doc]

3. I'll never look at Donald Duck the same way again...n/t

[jobycom]

4. They do kind of look like fuzzy, short T-Rex, don't they?

[shain from kane]

5. "Duck of Death".

Little Bill Daggett: That you here, Bob, on the cover? "The Duck of Death?"
W.W. Beauchamp: Duke. It's the Duke. "Duke of Death"

[nealmhughes]

6. Something for Colbert to add to the threat list!

Thank God that Noah didn't have room on the ark for those nasty flesh-ripping monsters!

[Salviati]

7. You should know better than to pick up a duck in a dungeon

[dcfirefighter]

8. "ancient tree-climbing crocodiles"

I don't think I've ever heard of anything scarier than that.

[Dead_Parrot]

9. Here's an interesting possible snippet...

Like the Bunyip or the Wild Haggis, The Aussies have a creature called the "Drop Bear", a giant Koala that leaps on you from the trees and eats you. It has been (seriously) suggested that the Drop Bear is a modern version of Thylacoleo carnifex (the marsupial lion) in that a) It should have been encountered by the aboriginal Aussies, if dating is anything to go by, and b) Might have passed into "white man's culture" from there...

[dcfirefighter]

10. I heard the drop bear

story was concocted (or perhaps kept) to keep youngin's from cavorting under eucalypts, which tend to drop their boughs during drought.

[Dead_Parrot]

11. It's true, they drop branches like other trees drop leaves....

Maybe I'm just being a die-hard romantic. But I'd love it if the Drop-Bear was a 50,000 year old aborigine legend/memory... :D

[dcfirefighter]

12. I think you may be right

Oral histories must live on. And people have been in Australia for 70,000 years, right?

[Dead_Parrot]

13. About that long, yeah

I was facinated - and disturbed - to hear Australia has lost ~190 languages in the last 150 years.

That's a lot of oral history :(

Edit: Having checked, the current consensus seems to be 45k BP... What the hell, I always preferred Byron to Solway :)

[dcfirefighter]

14. Where'd you hear this?

And perhaps, much of that history was kept in the new language?

Ever read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond?

[Dead_Parrot]

15. It was the local treeware....

but IIRC it was a UN report, if you want to hit google. I couldn't see it on a fast run, but I may have missed it.

Yeah, I have a copy of GGS. I recently lent it to a mate of mine (a Māori) who said he'd never known how lucky he was...

[Random_Australian]

16. We are going to lose more soon. There are only a few people left

who speak the old bundjalung languages (most of the bundjalung languages are gone already)

When they go, the language goes too.

(I would like to point out that bundjalung - which is probably mispelled - refers to a particular area, one that had a particularly dense population and many tribes and languages in one area, and is at the very east of Australia)