Just over a decade ago, an outback cattle station worker in the NT stumbled across a rare diprotodon fossil sticking out of the red soil. Now fondly known as Shirley, scientists have discovered how old the marsupial is.
: Scientists have discovered the age of the only diprotodon fossil to ever be found in the Northern Territory.The fossil is undergoing work to prepare it for display at the Museum and Art Gallery of the NT.
Half buried in the red soil of a large riverbank at Auvergne Station, 300 kilometres south-west of Katherine, was the rare fossil of a giant wombat-like marsupial that roamed Australia thousands of years ago. "Using OSL dating, we were able to say when that sediment was last exposed to daylight, and therefore when the fossil that was contained within those sediments was also deposited in that environment," he said.
Adam Yates, a palaeontologist from the Museum and Art Gallery of the NT, was quick to point out that although the diprotodon was technically not a wombat, wombats were their closest living relatives."It was about the size of a white rhinoceros, and probably would have looked a bit like a rhinoceros, but without the horns," he said.Researchers from the WA Museum Boola Bardip are hoping to recover up to five skeletons of the Diprotodon from a remote mine site in the Pilbara.
Diprotodon Fossil Wombat Wombat Fossil
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