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| PhD student Michael Curry arranges the bones of a 50,000-year-old marsupial lion in the Naracoorte Hospital's CT-scanner [Credit: ABC South East SA: Kate Hill] |
Researchers and students from two universities have joined in a bid to trace the extinct species' fascinating past.
At Naracoorte Hospital on Friday, University of New England PhD student Michael Curry held the skull of a young adult in his hands and described the meaning of the lion's grim scientific moniker — Thylacoleo carnifex.
"It's scientific name means 'pouched lion' and carnifex means 'executioner' or 'butcher'," he said.
The animal's enormous scissor-like teeth, used in conjunction with a large thumb claw, meant it would be able to dispatch much larger prey quite easily.
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| Michael Curry shows the large thumb claw of the 'executioner' lion, which the animal used to disembowel prey [Credit: ABC South East SA: Kate Hill] |
By sending the bones through the CT-scanner, Mr Curry is hoping the X-rays will give a clearer picture of the internal bone structure of the lion, giving researchers an idea of what the animal was like.
"What I'm trying to do is look at how they grew," he said. "Those enormous teeth were that size when they were small. We want to know how the skull actually grew around the teeth and what it was able to feed on, and how that would have affected the animal's behaviour."
Mr Curry said the lions' bones had been found scattered all over Australia, including recent discoveries in the Nullabor, but only in small numbers.
"We actually don't know a lot about them — they're quite rare as fossils," he said.
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| Not your average patient — a skull and leg bones of an extinct marsupial lion are scanned at Naracoorte Hospital [Credit: ABC South East SA: Kate Hill] |
Discovered when a front-end loader broke through the wall of a cave at Henschke's Quarry, Mr Curry was part of the team of researchers that was invited into the cave by the property's owners.
He said the unique climate of the cave — untouched for thousands of years — would have kept the fossils in tip-top condition, but once exposed to light and air the bones tended to dry out and crumble.
"Some of these literally fell out of the walls of the cave," he said.
Mr Curry said it was amazing to stumble across a skull lying in sediment behind a column in the cave. After many years studying the extinct lions, Mr Curry said he could now bring the animal to life in his imagination.
"It almost gets a bit scary," he said. "You go to some remote places in Australia and you can imagine what the animal was like and if you came across it when it was still alive wandering through the bush."
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| The tiny and intricate bones of a complete foot belonging to a marsupial lion [Credit: ABC South East SA: Kate Hill] |
University of Adelaide Environment Institute Research Fellow Liz Reed, was also part of the team that came across the cave, said they were waiting for funding to be able to date the site at Naracoorte correctly.
"Michael is working on what the animal was like; we're working on when it was living here and what sort of environment it was living in," she said. "When and where and how it was living is really the cool story we're after."
Author: Kate Hill | Source: ABC News Website [September 01, 2015]