Giant marsupials (animals with a pouch)

There is an interesting podcast entitled "Dr. Karl's Great Moments in Science" that I was listening to the other day.  He was talking about spotted hyena's and their character traits. One ability they have is to break bones easily with their strong jaws.

He referenced a paper written by Stephen Wroe from the University of Sydney. The paper is called Bite Club and it compared animals of all sizes to their bite force quotient.  He wanted to know which animal could bite down the hardest compared with their body size.

Wroe studied mammals and marsupials, both alive and extinct.  He found that marsupials have a greater bite force quotient, and it was also higher in those animals who consistently attacked animals bigger than themselves .

"The spotted hyena scored 117 on the bite-o-meter, only slightly ahead of the lion at 112, but behind the tiger (127), the African hunting dog (142) and well behind the Tasmanian devil at 181. The all-time winner was the now-extinct Australian marsupial lion at 196."

That made me curious about marsupials.  I had never heard of a marsupial lion.  Here are some facts I learned.

The marsupial lion lived in Australia tens of thousands of years ago.  One complete and seven nearly complete skeletons were found in limestone caves on Australia's Nullabor Plain in 2002.  The animals would have been  6 1/2 feet long and would have weighed up to 285 pounds!  Other extinct animals, including carnivorous kangaroos and a giant wallaby, were also found.  If you would like to read the story, go here.

In South America there lived a marsupial saber tooth cat. The scientific name is thylacosmilus.  Here is a picture of a skull.

The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger or marsupial wolf, is the largest carnivorous marsupial of recent times and lived into the 20th century in Australia.  Film footage of this animal can be found here.  The last captive thylacine died in 1936.

The largest marsupial that ever lived, the diprotodon, was not carnivorous, but rather fed on trees and shrubs.  It lived in Australia also and is now extinct.  Standing on all four feet, it's shoulder height was up to 5 ft. 7 in.  That is my height, so imagining the size of one of these is easy.  They were ten feet from nose to tail. The males weighed up to 5,500 pounds, which is slightly larger than a white rhino. They looked a little like a rhino without a horn except it had hair like a horse. It is believed to have the pouch facing backwards like a wombat, instead of forward like a kangaroo.

One more interesting marsupial I found was a giant marsupial frog.  It is not a mammal, but has a pouch on its back where their eggs are stored until it is time for them to hatch.

Now you have heard something interesting.