Oligocene (Pt 17): Dawn of the Kangaroos

Ekaltadeta

Kangaroos are perhaps the single most iconic Australian mammals. As marsupials, we tend to think of them as lost relics of an earlier evolutionary period, and, indeed, they have been around for a long time. Of course, they have been evolving during that time, rather than standing still, but if we had a time machine, we could go back millions of years into Australia's past, and still find animals that were, more or less, kangaroos. But, obviously, there is a limit.

Exactly how far back that limit is partly depends on how kangaroo-like you want your kangaroos to be. But even then, there are some gaps in our knowledge that don't have direct counterparts on other continents. The obvious place to start is with the fossil record, and, here, at least, we can provide a clear answer. The oldest known fossil kangaroos date to around 28 million years ago, towards the end of the Oligocene.

Giant Kangaroos: Were They Utterly Hop-less?

Most people have a clear image of what a kangaroo is: a large herbivorous animal that carries its young in a pouch and that moves by hopping about on its hind legs. There are three living species of true kangaroo, and this description does, indeed, accurately fit all of them. However, the kangaroo family, or Macropodidae, is much larger than this, with a total of 63 species, most of which can generically be described as "wallabies". 

There are also several fossil species known, stretching back to the late Oligocene, over 25 million years ago. Having only skeletal remains, and often partial ones at that, while we know that they had sufficient similarities to be placed in the same family and their teeth indicate they were herbivorous, what about the other two features: pouches and hopping? 

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.

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries 2021

Lesmesodon, a weasel-sized hyenadont.
A new species from Early Eocene France was
 described this year

And so another year approaches its conclusion and the pandemic seemingly isn't done with us yet. I had to self-isolate after a positive test myself for a couple of weeks (no symptoms, though) but if there's one thing that doesn't interrupt, it's blogging, so everything went smoothly here. But now it's time for what's becoming a traditional look at the paleontological discoveries of the past year that didn't get covered here but are worthy of at least a brief mention.

Large Herbivores

When we think of vertebrate fossils, the first thing that pops to mind is almost certainly going to be a skeleton of some kind, or perhaps just part of one. But there are also such things as ichnofossils - fossilised remains of how an animal affected its environment that no longer include any physical part of the animal itself. Perhaps the most obvious of these are fossil trackways - footprints of long-gone animals preserved in mud or other soft material that has since turned to stone. A study published this year examined the tracks left by two species of fossil horse. One of them, a one-toed close relative of the living species inhabiting southern Canada during the Ice Ages, turned out to have been galloping at around 34 kph (21 mph), which is quite fast for its small size (perhaps it was running from something). More significantly, however, the three-toed Miocene horse Scaphohippus was using a relatively unusual gait called the "rack" typically only seen in specialised domestic breeds today. 

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2019

Nehalaennia, an 8 million-year-old rorqual
from the Netherlands, first described this year

As the year - and decade - approach their inevitable conclusion, it's time again to look back at a few palaeontological findings of 2019 that didn't, for whatever reason, make it into the regular Synapsida posts. As always, there is no theme to this list, just a sample of what seemed interesting linked only by when it happened to be published.

Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2018

Gordodon,
a new non-mammalian synapsid described this year

And so another year approaches its conclusion. As usual, I will wrap up here with a post looking at things from a slightly wider perspective. This time around, as I did last year, I am going to take a brief look at a range of scientific papers on fossil mammals that were published in 2018. There's not going to be any particular theme here beyond that, merely a list of things that caught my interest, and that were not, for various reasons, included in the blog proper. So, here we go:

Beginnings and Endings

In the modern day, it's pretty easy to tell mammals and reptiles apart. But, if we go far enough back in time, that eventually ceases to be so true. A common misunderstanding is that mammals evolved 'from' reptiles, but, in reality, mammals and reptiles are separate evolutionary lines that have lived alongside one another since long before there were dinosaurs. At least, that's true if we use the modern definition of 'reptile' since, of course, the animals that mammals really did evolve from would have looked an awful lot like reptiles if we'd been able to see them in the flesh.

Do Kangaroos Chew the Cud?

Mammals that eat a lot of grass, or other relatively low-quality vegetation, have to process their food thoroughly to extract the maximum amount of nutrition. I've previously discussed how this works in some detail, but, in general, there are two approaches. In "fore-gut fermenters", the stomach is divided into multiple chambers, allowing the animal to ferment its food, then bring the solid parts back up to the mouth to re-chew ("chewing the cud"), before sending it back to finish the job. This is the system found in cows, deer, camels, and many other animals, collectively known as "ruminants".

The second approach is to place the fermentation chamber behind the stomach, down in the colon. This is less efficient, but quicker, and is the arrangement found in horses, rhinos, and a number of other animals. Rabbits are also "hind-gut fermenters" of this sort, but take the additional step of re-eating the fermented food once it passes out of their back end for the first time.

I mentioned in passing in my previous post that kangaroos are fore-gut fermenters, but that they are not ruminants, and have a slightly different system. Today, I'm going to explain what it is that they do do. (Much of what follows applies equally to wallabies, and, to a lesser extent, rat-kangaroos).

Pliocene (Pt 15): Life on the Australian Grasslands

Kolopsis, a diprotodontid

At the dawn of the Pliocene, Australia was a relatively green continent, with plenty of rich, tropical and subtropical, vegetation. That changed as millions of years passed, with the continent becoming steadily drier and the grasslands and semi-desert of the Outback came into being. This was, of course, bad news for many of the animals that had lived there in the wetter past, many of which went extinct, but it also saw a noticeable increase in the number of grazing animals, for which wider grasslands were clearly a boon.

Elsewhere in the world, this sort of thing was benefiting animals such as horses, goats, and antelopes. But Australia was different. It wasn't, of course, the only island continent of the day, but it was the oldest by some margin, having separated from its neighbours long before South America split from Antarctica, or before animals stopped crossing between Eurasia and North America (even ignoring the Ice Age crossings of the Bering land bridge, which were, at this point, still in the future).

Pleistocene (Pt 15): Ice Age Down Under

Procoptodon

The island continent of Australia has today what is probably the strangest mammalian fauna of any continent. Yet it is also the continent that has, perhaps, suffered the greatest number of mammalian extinctions over the last 50,000 years or so. Many of those are relatively recent, or at least after the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 BC. But even compared with the Australia of, say, the 18th century, the wildlife of Ice Age Australia looked pretty odd.

In climactic terms, Australia didn't suffer too badly from the Ice Ages. It's too close to the equator to have had ice sheets get anywhere near it, although doubtless there was rather more snow on the mountains. (Although perhaps not too much - even today, Australia is the only continent to lack glaciers). Then, as today, much of the continent consisted of desert, and the bits that weren't were mostly arid grassland, albeit with denser woodlands around the eastern and northern coasts.

The Teeth of Dead Kangaroos

Not exactly lush vegetation

How to tell what long-extinct animals ate?

Aside from those that died recently enough to leave us mummified, rather than fossilised, remains, your best bet is probably fossilised dung. In the case of carnivores you might even be lucky enough to find the bones of their kills. Of course, both do need matching up to the correct animal, but the former, in particular, is not especially common. Absent such direct clues, then, we have to deduce what we can from the skeleton, and that generally means examining the teeth.

The overall shape of the teeth can give us some pretty clear indications of whether an animal was a carnivore or a herbivore. This is even more true for mammals than it is for dinosaurs, since we have plenty of clear examples alive today. Powerful stabbing canines and flesh-shearing molars indicate a carnivore, while flat grinding plates and leaf-clipping incisors imply a herbivore. There's obviously some gradation in between, in the case of omnivores, insectivores, and, for that matter, weird specialists such as vampire bats, but it's a good starting point.