All posts tagged: hamster

New megafauna looked like spiky, 30-pound hamster

New megafauna looked like spiky, 30-pound hamster

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In the latest episode of old museum collections revealing new discoveries, two researchers in Australia have solved a paleontological mystery with an Ice Age fossil first discovered over  100 years ago. The fossil was found in  the underground Foul Air Cave in Buchan, Victoria, Australia. It’s the partial skull of an Owen’s giant echidna (Megalibgwilia owenii), a now-extinct giant echidna that weighed 33.1 pounds and grew up to 3.3 feet-long. The genus name, Megalibgwilia, consists of “mega” (great or mighty in Ancient Greek) and “libgwil” (the Wemba Wemba word for echidna).  “The apparent absence of the extinct large-bodied Owen’s Giant Echidna Megalibgwilia owenii from Victoria is unusual in light of its wide distribution across the continent’s southeast including Tasmania,” the researchers write in a paper recently published in the journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology. “It is the first example of Megalibgwilia identified from Victoria, and reconciles the taxon’s otherwise disjunct southern distribution across mainland Australia.” Though the …