Australia's Vanished Beasts
Marsupial Lion
Thylacoleo carnifex
"Few extinct mammals have
aroused so much curiosity, so much conjecture as to their way of life and their
relationship to other forms as the enigmatic marsupial lion," the
paleontologist Rod Wells has written. What Wells and other experts know about
this creature they have gleaned from fossil bones, including the complete
skeleton discovered in 2002 and featured in "Bone Diggers." Despite
its name, T. carnifex was no lion. It
raised its young in a pouch, like all marsupials, and its anatomy suggests it
was built for dropping onto prey animals from trees rather than chasing them
down. Once it grabbed hold of a victim, with help from its large, clawed thumb,
the marsupial lion may have dragged it into a tree (as shown here) to devour it.