Chris Nedin has another post of great interest (even if it is for a late period, the Pleistocene) which goes into my file of "the older naturalists were great observers", as he shows how modern chemistry supports Richard Owens' diagnosis of Thylacoleo as a carnivore, even though it is in a clade of herbivores.
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A restoration of the skull of Thylacoleo. From The Ancient Life History of the Earth.Without a doubt, the extinct marsupial predator Thylacoleo was one of the strangest carnivorous mammals ever to have evolved. This predator from ancient Australia did not have piercing canines but instead bit into…
The whole of natural history fascinates me, but everyone has their own favorite topics, and one of the most intriguing subject areas (to me, at least) is predator/prey interactions. Herbivores are interesting in their own right, surely, but for me it is the predators that are the most thought-…
Just because a bunch of German, French and British people invented geology some 200 or more years ago, all the "type locations" for the geological column have been defined in terms of Northern Hemisphere locations. Finally, though, we Australians have our own period, and it's a doozy - the earliest…
Restoration of the skull of Thylacoleo. From The Ancient Life History of the Earth.
Thylacoleo was one strange mammal. A close relative of living koalas, kangaroos, and wombats, the largest species of Thylacoleo were lion-sized carnivores that stalked the Australian continent between 2 million and…
'Prerogative of harlots' has a nice additional story:
http://paleocoll.blogspot.com/2009/05/cool.html