Artist's reconstruction of the marsupial lion found in Leaena's Breath Cave. 'Leaena' means 'lioness' in Latin.
Credit: WA Museum
The first complete skeleton of a marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex,ever found. It was discovered the first time scientists set foot in the Nullarbor cave.
Credit: Clay Bryce, WA Museum
Bones of what the scientists think is a prehistoric malleefowl from the Nullarbor cave.
Credit: Clay Bryce
SYDNEY: Dozens of fossilised species, including a marsupial lion, giant wombat and new wallaby, have been discovered in an underground cave on the border of Western and South Australia.
Led by palaeontologist Gavin Prideaux from Flinders University in South Australia, a team of scientists from Flinders and the Western Australian Museum in Perth has returned from their latest expedition to Leaena's Breath Cave on the Nullarbor Plain - a dry, flat and almost treeless region stretching 200,000 square kilometres on the Great Australian Bight coast.
Since the cave's discovery in 2002, some 100,000 bones have been collected, including those of seven new species of wallaby and tree kangaroo, plus some brilliantly preserved megafaunal remains. The cave contains bones that date from as early as one million years ago to as recent as two weeks ago, providing an unprecedented glimpse into how the environment and its inhabitants have changed over time.
"This was a period of time when substantial climatic change was occurring - between one million and 700,000 years ago. It caused the final period of faunal turnover [in Australia] and led to our modern fauna," said Prideaux. "I can honestly say that it's one of Australia's most important fossil sites."
Wallaby with raptor's claw
The cave was discovered in 2002 by Paul Devine, a member of a team led by Ken Boland of St. Francis' Church in Melbourne. Devine spotted a small hole from his car window and measured the speed of the air racing in and out of the solution pipe, which turned out to be more than 100 km per hour, indicating a large void below.
The first exploration of the 60 m long, 30 m wide and 15 m high cavern yielded a perfectly preserved and complete skeleton of a marsupial lion (Thylacoleo carnifex), a species that had been extinct for 50,000 years. That same day another member of the team also dug out the remains of a Tasmanian tiger (Thylacine).
More recently, a new odd-looking species of wallaby has been uncovered. According to Prideaux, it had a long, sharp, rotating hook on its hind foot that looked like a Velociraptor's claw.
"I have no idea what a herbivore was doing with a hook on its foot," he said. "It could have been a defence mechanism, or it could have been used for climbing. One good thing about being a palaeontologist is you find things you'd never believe existed."
Because the contents of the cave have remained dry and protected for hundred of thousands of years, the fossils are incredibly well preserved. "In typical cave and river deposits, the bones of many different individuals are mixed up; you don't often get complete skeletons," said Prideaux. "What's awesome about this site is that animals fall down the hole and hop off into the darkness of the cave to die because they cannot get out, so the skeleton is left there [to be preserved]. Finding an articulated fossil (with the bones connected as they were in life) is like finding the picture on the front to of a jigsaw box."
