SYDNEY, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- An Australian palaeontologist has discovered that a giant prehistoric ice age beast was the only marsupial species ever known to migrate for food.
Weighing in at approximately 3 tons and standing around 1.8 meters tall, the diprotodon was a member of Australia's megafauna, a group of 90 large bodied animals that roamed 1.6 million to 45,000 years ago during a time called the Pleistocene.
"Eastern Australia, 300,000 years ago, had an ecosystem that looked more like the Serengeti of East Africa today," author of the research, Gilbert Price, from the University of Queensland told Xinhua.
"There were big birds, a giant turtle, huge lizards and a population of diverse migratory species."
But until now, marsupials of that time, that were similar to Australia's modern koalas and wombats, were not believed to have travelled for food.
"It would go somewhere at the start of the year and basically track its food sources through that 12 month period and then come back to where it started from," Price explained.
"There is no marsupial today or that we know of in the past that did that."
The mystery was uncovered when Price became inspired by a U.S. study that analyzed geochemical samples of teeth from a Woolly Mammoth.
"We examined part of the collection of teeth from the Queensland Museum in Brisbane," Price said.
"We were able to extract all this information, amazing information about what it ate and how it move around."
Price now plans to expand his research to other diprotodon around Australia.
But as for the mystery of what happened to Australia's megafauna, Price said: "The reality is that we just don't have that much information."
"It is likely that climate change was the main factor in their extinction, but some people even suggest the first humans who came to Australia may have hunted them."
