Thylacoleo

theage.com.au => Murderous marsupial in mystery cave

FOR the giant animals of ancient Australia – and sometimes the people – it meant sudden, bone-crunching death. A silent stalker with the most powerful jaws of any mammal in the world, it could remain invisible until the second it dropped from a tree or leapt from behind a log to deal death with a single, spine-severing bite.

Meet thylacoleo, the “marsupial lion” that terrorised Australia for millions of years and moved the 19th-century British paleontologist Sir Richard Owen to describe it as “the fellest of predatory beasts”.

Found intact in a cave in Australia, a complete Thylacoleo skeleton! How cool is that? Australia had the really nifty Pleistocene killers.

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