{"id":50192,"date":"2026-04-14T05:52:46","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T05:52:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=50192"},"modified":"2026-04-14T05:52:46","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T05:52:46","slug":"giant-echidnas-weighing-15kg-roamed-victoria-and-the-evidence-was-hiding-in-plain-sight-mammals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=50192","title":{"rendered":"Giant echidnas weighing 15kg roamed Victoria \u2013 and the evidence was hiding in plain sight | Mammals"},"content":{"rendered":"


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A prehistoric fossil, hiding in plain sight in museum storage for more than a century, has revealed that giant echidnas once roamed Victoria<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Owen\u2019s giant echidna, Megalibgwilia owenii<\/em>, lived during the Pleistocene<\/a>, a geological epoch that began 2.5m years ago. It grew to about 1 metre long and weighed up to 15kg \u2013 about twice the size of Australia\u2019s modern echidnas.<\/p>\n

Specimens of the extinct monotreme have previously been found across Australia, from Western Australia to Tasmania \u2013 but they had been mysteriously absent from the fossil record in Victoria.<\/p>\n

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That changed when Tim Ziegler, the collection manager of vertebrate palaeontology at the Museums Victoria Research Institute, came across a skull fragment in \u201ca tray of unsorted fossils\u201d that had been excavated in 1907 from Foul Air Cave, in the Buchan cave complex in East Gippsland.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember plucking out this one bone fragment, which isn\u2019t much longer than your finger,\u201d Ziegler said. \u201cIt was just one among many \u2013 I think it had probably been mistaken for a hind limb of a small kangaroo.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/svg><\/span>Owen\u2019s giant echidna fossil.<\/span> Photograph: Museums Victoria<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But Ziegler noticed the symmetry of the fossil, the arch of a palate, and \u201cinternal spaces that would have been where air passed through when it was breathing. These basic features said to me: this is an echidna beak, and it\u2019s huge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ziegler first noticed the fossil in the collection in 2021, but further work \u2013 including 3D scans of modern and fossil echidna specimens held in museum collections around the country \u2013 was needed to confirm the discovery.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew what I was looking at in an instinctive sense, but then the job is to document it, to demonstrate it and to prove it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Using historical archives, Ziegler confirmed the specimen had been collected by museum officer Frank Spry in an expedition to Foul Air Cave more than a century earlier.<\/p>\n

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<\/svg><\/span>\u2018It turns out they were there all along\u2019 \u2026 Foul Air Cave where the Owen\u2019s giant echidna fossil was found.<\/span> Photograph: Rob French\/Museums Victoria<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Owen\u2019s giant echidna was likely a similar size to the long-beaked echidnas, Zaglossus,<\/em> which today live in the tropics of New Guinea.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut its skeleton is much more robust than that comparably sized animal. Its bones, particularly in the limbs, have deeper, more prominent muscle scars and larger attachments for ligaments that showed it was using much greater force when it interacted with the landscape,\u201d Ziegler said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can imagine either digging for buried larvae, larger prey of beetles, or bogong moths, for example, or \u2026 tearing tree bark to access this food.\u201d<\/p>\n

The identification of the Buchan specimen fills in a 1,000km gap in the species\u2019 known distribution.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe earliest \u2026 collected fossils are from New South Wales in the 1860s,\u201d Ziegler said. \u201cSince then, they\u2019ve been located in south-west Western Australia, at the Mammoth Cave, for example, [and] in the Naracoorte region in South Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Giant echidna fossils have also been found in Tasmania, \u201cwhich, at the time that this animal was living, was in all likelihood connected by a land bridge\u201d.<\/p>\n

For Ziegler, the discoveries of the fossils in historically temperate\u00a0and forested habitat invited the question: why weren\u2019t the animals also roaming ice age Victoria?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt turns out they were there all along. And we just needed the right moment to recognise their presence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The research was published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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A prehistoric fossil, hiding in plain sight in museum storage for more than a century, has revealed that giant echidnas once roamed Victoria. The Owen\u2019s giant…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}