Gargantuan wombat the size of an SUV stuns scientists

In Australia, size really does matter. Consider, for example, a stack of over-sized icons – "The Big Prawn"; "The Big Cow"; "The Big Pineapple"; "The Big Galah"; and "The Big Beer Can", to name but a few. Scores of these not-so-little beauties can be found dotted along highways across the nation, looming as signposts to nearby tourist attractions, in turn underlining what is often referred to as a quintessential Aussie trait – namely the need "to state the obvious".

Now, Australian scientists in northeast Queensland are celebrating another very big find: the bones of a prehistoric "giant wombat."

According to the Australian Geographic magazine, this three-ton plant-eating diprotodon – compared in size to a four-wheel drive or mature rhinoceros and known for its enormous tusks and tiny brain – roamed the earth for roughly 2.5 million years before it became extinct about 55,000 years ago.

Scientists leading the research project – a joint venture between the University of Queensland, the University of New South Wales, the Queensland Museum and Xtrata Mount Isa Mines – are also being hailed for unearthing the most complete diprotodon skeleton ever found from a single specimen.

"It was a bit like a wombat but looked more like a massive, rhino-type beast," paleontologist Professor Sue Hand told Australian Geographic. "It was the biggest of them all – the biggest marsupial that ever lived on any continent."

Hand added that the demise of the diprotodon and other mega fauna had become a "hot topic" in Australian paleontology.

As she told the magazine: "There's a couple of different suggestions. One is that humans actually over-hunted and basically wiped out the Australian mega fauna. Another is that it was probably climate change, because a lot of the mega fauna had already been lost before indigenous people arrived in Australia…But of course it could be a combination of the two."

The prehistoric skeleton of the biggest marsupial that ever lived was unearthed by a dig on a remote cattle station between Normanton and Burketown – an area, according to the BBC, that researchers believe "could contain a huge graveyard of mega-fauna that once roamed the Australian continent".

"We found the most gigantic marsupial ever known," Prof Mike Archer, a professor of biological science at the University of New South Wales, told the BBC.

"These were very huge animals but with pouches. If one tried to visualize what this thing looked like, you'd have to sort of think of a gigantic wombat on steroids."

AFP reports that it is understood Australia’s mega fauna evolved to such large sizes to cope with inhospitable climates and food scarcity. To date, fossils have been found of prehistoric emus, carnivorous kangaroos and tree-dwelling crocodiles. But no prehistoric Crocodile Dundees.

The diprotodon skeleton will be housed at the Riversleigh Fossil Centre, a World Heritage site in Queensland.