Miocene (Pt 34): The First Kangaroos in Australia

Ekaltadeta

During the Miocene, Australia was further south than it is today. However, it seems that the generally warmer climate of the early part of the epoch more than compensated for this, since we know that there were already coral reefs off the coasts of the main continent and also of New Zealand, which is far too cold for such things today. At the dawn of the epoch, the continent seems to have been largely covered by open woodland but as the world warmed in the Middle Miocene, and Australia edged northward, it became not only hotter, but wetter, until tropical and semi-tropical rainforests became the norm. It was only in the Late Miocene, around 10 million years or so ago, that the climate started drying again, especially in the interior, and the dense jungle began to die away, leading the way for the formation of today's Outback in the following, Pliocene epoch - although, even at the end of the Miocene, the coasts were more heavily forested than most of them are today.

Pleistocene (Pt 16): Giant Wombats and Marsupial Lions

While Australia is not the only continent to have marsupials today - they're also found in the Americas - it certainly has the largest ones. This was, perhaps, even more true during the Ice Ages than it is today.

Of course, being an arid, tropical to subtropical, continent the Ice Ages affected Australia rather less than they affected Europe or North America, or even southern South America. There were no glaciers to be seen, and not a lot of snow unless you wanted to climb a mountain. On the other hand, there were some pretty big animals, including lizards and flightless birds larger than anything we have today. And, yes, the marsupials were bigger, too.

Many weren't that much larger than their modern equivalents - although, to be fair, that's quite large in the case of a kangaroo. But not all of them, for this was also the time of the largest marsupial ever to have lived: Diprotodon optatum, the giant wombat.