A giant prehistoric Ice Age marsupial related to wombats and koalas has been discovered to be the only marsupial known to have ever followed annual seasonal migration.
Likening it to “Australia’s Ice Age Serengeti”, researchers tracked the now extinct megafauna diprotodon – a three-tonne beast up to 1.8m tall and 3.5mlong – using fossils and geochemistry tools.
A team led by the University of Queensland have shown that the Ice Age diprotodon would make seasonal, round-trip pilgrimages up to 200km in search of food.
The extinction of the diprotodon may provide some insight about the possible threats to contemporary migratory mammals and the consequences if they are wiped out.
“The diprotodon superficially looks like a wombat but in fact it’s in a completely different family,” said Dr Julien Louys of Griffith’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution.
“They’re famous on a global scale for being the largest marsupial that ever lived.
“We were able to determine