![]() ![]() Nimbadon lived 15 million years ago in the canopy of lowland Australian rainforests. Fossil skeleton of a mature adult Nimbadon. Our initial research showed that Nimbadon was not only a “tree-hugger”, but also a “tree-hanger”, spending some of its time suspended from tree branches like a sloth. ![]() These animals were highly specialised climbers and lived vastly different lifestyles compared to their closest living relatives – the land-dwelling, burrowing wombats. Its hands and feet had specially adapted opposable thumbs with huge curved claws for climbing, penetrating bark and grasping branches. It had strong arms with very mobile shoulder and elbow joints. Nimbadon is now known from its complete skeleton, including material representing developmental ages ranging from tiny pouch-young to mature adults. Photo: Shutterstockīut like many of the species we’ve unearthed from Riversleigh, the closer we look at these animals, the more bizarre and fascinating they become. Modern-day sun bears climb trees and lounge there much like sloths do. When we first uncovered jawbones of Nimbadon at Riversleigh in 1993, we thought we were looking at very large leaf-eating marsupials who foraged for food on the forest floor. Yet surprisingly, in terms of body size and lifestyle, they are more comparable to sun bears, which today can be found scaling the rainforest canopies of Southeast Asia. Nimbadon belongs to a diverse group of long extinct, large-bodied marsupials known as diprotodontoids, the likes of which include the largest marsupial to have ever lived, the 2.5 tonne megafaunal Diprotodon, and bizarre trunked marsupials reminiscent of modern-day tapirs.Īmong living animals, Nimbadon is most closely related to wombats. The huge tree-dwelling herbivorous marsupials, known as Nimbadon, weighed about 70kg, making them the largest arboreal (tree dwelling) mammals known from Australia. They had powerful arms, large hands and feet and huge claws to assist climbing through the rainforest tree tops. Photo: Peter Schouten, Author provided Reconstruction of a mother and baby Nimbadon. In a newly published paper in the Journal of Paleontology, we have done just that, using 15 million-year-old skeletons of a giant bear-like marsupial from the world-famous Riversleigh World Heritage Area (Boodjamulla) in Waanyi country of northwest Queensland. Although long dead, fossil skeletons provide an incredible window into the lifestyle and environment of an extinct animal.īy analysing the various features of fossil bones we can reveal not only the overall size and shape of the animal, but also what kind of movement the animal was capable of, its lifestyle, and the environment in which it lived.īut what if we looked inside fossil bones? What secrets would it reveal about the growth and development of an extinct animal? ![]()
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