A fanged kangaroo from the Riversleigh World Heritage Area. Photo: Kaylene Butler |
An extinct family of fanged kangaroos could have lived longer than originally thought, a Queensland researcher says.
Fanged kangaroos were roughly the size of a wallaby and existed between 25 million and 10 million years ago, about five million years longer than what researchers originally estimated, Univesity of Queensland PhD student Kaylene Butler said.
Ms Butler said two teeth, believed to have belonged to a fanged kangaroo, found at in the Riversleigh World Heritage Area in north Queensland meant researchers now had to start again to find an extinction theory for the scurrying plant eater.
"Northern Queensland was predominantly covered in rainforest when these fanged kangaroos first appear in the fossil record," she said.
“Every hypothesis we have about their extinction doesn’t line up with the timing of when they went extinct so we kind of have to start from scratch now.
"The original hypothesis related to events during a change in climate 15 million years ago but the balbarids (fanged kangaroos) persisted past that.
“This new finding of their persistence until 10 million years ago means something else must have been at play, such as being outcompeted by other species.”
Ms Butler said two major events from about 10 million years ago could have contributed to their extinction.
“You were starting to see the extension of open grasslands and open woodlands and at the same time you were also seeing potential ancestors of modern kangaroos on the scene,” she said.
“Potentially the answer is that the fanged kangaroo was outcompeted in food and resources.
“They just couldn’t handle an environment that wasn’t rainforest.”
The research was published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.
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