Huge Kangaroo From The Ice Age Had a Distinctive Hyperlink to The Big Panda

Greater than 40,000 years in the past, the panorama of southwestern Australia was replete with big kangaroos.

One in every of these extinct kangaroos, often called a short-faced kangaroo, boasted a single-toed clawed foot (modern-day roos have three toes), weighed greater than 260 kilos (118 kilograms), and munched on vegetation.

In line with a brand new research printed within the journal PLOS One, these creatures’ giant jaws allowed them to chomp by robust meals like mature leaves, stems, and branches when different meals sources have been scarce.

Just one animal right this moment has comparable jaw bones and muscle groups: big pandas, which additionally eat hard-to-chew, thick vegetation like bamboo shoots.

In actual fact, the brand new analysis signifies, the kangaroo’s jaw was extra comparable in form and performance to that of right this moment’s big pandas than to modern-day kangaroos.

“Basically, they’d have appeared fairly completely different to modern-day kangaroos, with extra thick-set our bodies, lengthy muscular arms with prolonged fingers, usually solely a single large toe on every foot, and box-shaped heads that have been formed extra like a koala’s,” research creator D. Rex Mitchell instructed Newsweek.

Inventive reconstruction of the extinct short-faced kangaroo. (N. Tamura)

Jaws like a large panda’s

Scientists already guessed that these big kangaroos’ jaws enabled them to eat hard-to-chew vegetation. Mitchell determined to check that principle by figuring out how a lot power the cranium might resist.

So he created 3D digital fashions of a short-faced kangaroo cranium and simulated the mechanical forces at play. Mitchell discovered that the enormous cheekbones of this historic animal supported giant muscle groups that will have prevented the animal’s jaw from dislocating throughout big bites.

The bones on the entrance and prime of its cranium fashioned an arch that helped hold the muscle groups from twisting.

In line with the research, the extinct kangaroo’s physiology means that it had tailored to reap the benefits of meals that have been tough to chew greater than any Australian herbivore alive right this moment. Trendy-day kangaroos, against this, want grasses, flowers, ferns, and moss.

An enormous panda munching on robust bamboo. (Wang He/Getty Pictures)

“The flexibility to eat elements of vegetation that different herbivores of the time couldn’t would have supplied them a aggressive edge when instances have been robust,” Mitchell stated.

In line with a 2015 research, nevertheless, short-faced kangaroos left no trendy kangaroo descendants. Their closest dwelling cousins could possibly be the banded hare-wallaby, or Lagorchestes fasciatus.

These tiny marsupials stay solely on remoted islands off the coast of western Australia and are susceptible to extinction.

This text was initially printed by Enterprise Insider.

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