Nullarbor Brush Kangaroo
| Nullarbor Brush Kangaroo | ||||||||||||
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| Bettongia pusilla | ||||||||||||
| McNamara , 1997 |
The Nullarbor Brush Kangaroo ( Bettongia pusilla ) is an extinct marsupial from the genus of the Brush Kangaroo ( Bettongia ). It is known only from subfossil bone material that was unearthed in Western Australia and in Koonalda Cave in the Nullarbor Desert in South Australia . The lower jaw is built lighter and the teeth are smaller than the more recent brush kangaroo species. The molars are straight and less bulbous with higher crowns. The nature of the bones suggests that this species became extinct during early colonial colonization by the Europeans.
The Aborigines in the Pilbara region in Western Australia have the words wirlpa and weelba . They are referring to a very small kangaroo, the description of which does not fit in any species that has been observed live for the past 200 years. Presumably this animal could be the Nullarbor Brush Kangaroo.
literature
- John A. Long, Michael Archer: Prehistoric mammals of Australia and New Guinea: One hundred million years of evolution. UNSW Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-86840-435-6 .
- Jim A. McNamara: Some smaller macropod fossils of South Australia. In: Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales 117 (1997), pp. 97-106.
- Peter Menkhorst: A Field Guide to the Mammals of Australia. Oxford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-19-550870-X .
- Kristofer Helgen and Elizabeth G. Veatch: Extinct Australian Marsupials and Monotremes In: Handbook of the Mammals of the World Volume 5: Marsupials and Monotremes, Lynx Edictions, Barcelona, 2015, ISBN 978-84-96553-99-6 , p. 29
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bettongia pusilla in the endangered Red List species the IUCN 2016 Posted by: Burbidge, AA & Woinarski, J., 2012. Accessed April 24, 2020th
- ↑ Chris Johnson: Australia's Mammal extinctions: A 50,000 Year History. Cambridge University Press, 2006.