New megafauna looked like spiky, 30-pound hamster

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 fossil was retrieved from a cave in Buchan, researchers identified it in Museums Victoria’s Palaeontology Collection. Tim Ziegler—collection manager of vertebrate palaeontology at Museums Victoria Research Institute—initially spotted it in 2021, and found it came from a 1907 expedition by Frank Spry, a naturalist and museum officer. 

“Museum collections preserve the link between science, heritage and people,” Ziegler, lead author of the study, said in a statement. “Over a century ago, Spry along with scientists and locals investigated Buchan’s caves with little more than ropes and kerosene lamps, and they inspired us to carry on their work.”

Ziegler and his co-author Jeremy Lockett, a Deakin University vertebrate palaeontology student, investigated modern and fossil echidnas in other Australian museum collections, presumably comparing them to the one from the Museums Victoria. Its characteristic straight-beaked snout, with which it would have crushed big insects and dug into Ice Age Australian soils, verified it to be an Owen’s giant echidna.

“Previous research by Museums Victoria has shown the Buchan Caves preserve an exceptional record of Australia’s unique megafauna,” Ziegler said. “The next amazing discovery could come from inside the museum, from continued fieldwork, or the keen eyes of a citizen scientist.”

Today, echidnas are egg-laying, spiky-looking, long-nosed mammals that live in places including Australia and Indonesia. They grow 14 to 30 inches long, weigh 5.5 to 22 pounds, and are endangered. And sometimes, these hedgehog-like creatures end up in shark vomit. 

 

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