(Program not available for streaming.) NOVA takes viewers to the stark Australian outback in search of the elusive bones of one of the world's.
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But none was quite as bizarre or fearsome as Thylacoleo, the meat-eating marsupial lion. Pound for pound, this creature had the most powerful bite of any mammal, living or extinct—in fact, its bite was equal to that of a much bigger African lion today. But even though it was the king of ancient Australian predators, Thylacoleo was eventually toppled from its throne, dying out along with all the rest of the outsized beasts.
What happened to drive so many extraordinary megabeasts into oblivion? The analysis of its bones throws new light on Thylacoleo's many peculiarities, notably the question of how it attacked its prey. And, finally, the show digs into the mystery of what finally overwhelmed the giant Ice Age creatures and whether early human hunters were responsible. The adventure begins when paleontologist John Long receives an e-mail from an amateur explorer with a tantalizing photo attached. The photo shows an apparently intact skeleton of Thylacoleo in the depths of a remote cave in the outback.
Since no one has found a complete skeleton before, the discovery would be a paleontological milestone. So Long and his colleagues at the Western Australian Museum set out on an arduous expedition, crossing the desolate Nullarbor Plain to pinpoint the remote cave shown in the e-mail. Over the next three weeks, exploring the dangerous recesses of the ancient cavern, the team finds a remarkable trove of fossil remains—including several astonishingly well-preserved Thylacoleo skeletons together with previously unknown species of giant kangaroo.
Back in Perth, the team begins studying the bones and building up a picture of the marsupial lion's unique anatomy and behavior.
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Although most marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas are herbivores, Thylacoleo was something completely different—a fearsome predator with pincer-like front teeth and a slashing front claw on its thumb. Yet it wasn't built like a lion; with its low-slung body and short legs, it could never have chased its prey at high speed. Instead, it probably waited in ambush for its next meal, perhaps dropping from trees.
For three weeks they'll live in harsh and isolated conditions. We were about almost 2, kilometers from Perth and almost kilometers to the nearest town. You have to bring in all your food, all your fuel, all your water, all your expertise, and then just do your work.
In the middle of this desert, they'll be at the mercy of the elements. Temperatures in the daytime soar over a hundred degrees and then drop to freezing at night. And when the wind kicks up, it can literally blow the camp away. But this parched landscape was formed in a totally different environment than it is today. Right here, where I'm standing, 20 million years ago was the bottom of the sea, limestone rock was formed. Today, the Nullarbor Plain is vast and featureless, but below ground is a different story. When ground waters rose up, percolating through that limestone rock, dissolving away calcium carbonate, the result was the formation of caves.
Today there are thousands of caves throughout the Nullarbor region. Only a few of those caves are known to contain fossils.
Concealing their location is critical, because there's a thriving international black market in ancient animal bones. They spread out and never take the same route to the cave twice. Leaving tracks in the scrub could give away the location of the site to poachers, and priceless material could be lost to science. It's going to be tricky just getting inside the cave. The only way down is on a harness and ropes. The scientists carefully build a scaffold at the mouth of the cave so they can lower themselves into the darkness.
This will be the only safe way out if anything goes wrong. It's about an meter drop to the floor, and then the cabins go on, you know, in all directions, but for quite a way. For many members of the team, this kind of exploring is a completely new experience. They spend most of the first day at the campsite, learning to use their gear. Any mistake could be fatal. Basically, each time they do it, they've got to treat it like it's their life in their hands. No matter how experienced the scientists are, the winds at the cave entrance can be treacherous. While you're on the rope or the ladder, you're often getting buffeted around, so you've got to be very careful at all times.
The next three weeks will be a test of endurance and patience. But it's also the chance for a unique scientific discovery. You know this is something that us paleontologists dream of every day: It's total, pitch black darkness, mostly totally silent. You do get a bit of wind and a bit of air diffusing through the caverns and the rocks at times, but mostly it's pretty isolated, probably about as isolated and lonely as you can get, anywhere in the world.
We dropped down, and we had to go right to the bottom of another large cavern. And then we had to crawl on our hands and knees through another narrow passageway. This is the first time I've ever had to work in really close spaces in a cave, and it was a bit claustrophobic for me, I had to sort of adapt to it. Fossils are not always draped on a nice flat surface. One has to often crawl down between the spaces between the rocks and come in from underneath to get the remainder of the bones.
And sometimes the rocks are fairly precarious, so there is an element of risk. Piece by precious piece, they start to uncover ancient bones. Some are so fragile that just a touch could destroy them. See, this is a major job, to get someone in here, just with a light brush, to brush away the gypsum, consolidate the bone. Yeah, it's a beautifully preserved bone too. Now, of course, if we could find some teeth or a bit of jaw or a bit of skull, that will enable us to put a definite identification on this.
I think there's bone all through this area. Here we have the remains of giant kangaroos, three meters high, huge wombats the size of ponies, and, in addition to that, we've got weird species: It looks like the cave was a prehistoric deathtrap. They find many of the bones directly under the small opening on the surface. I can imagine that a giant wombat or a kangaroo just running along, didn't see the hole, fell straight down. All we know is that, in terms of geological time, you only have to have one animal fall down a hole every hundred years, and over the course of several thousand years, it mounts up to a lot of skeletons.
They break for the day, but there's a wealth of fossils waiting to be recovered. And they know that somewhere under this ancient soil is the big prize: Yeah, I'll get the other guys—Marc and Jeff and maybe Benny—into that new chamber. Leave no corner of the cave unsearched As they continue their hunt, they find of hundreds of bones. Many are familiar, belonging to species found at other sites. But then comes a stunning realization. This cave holds hidden treasure, unique new skeletons of extinct species, previously unknown to science. This is the most weirdest kangaroo I've ever seen in my life, great big whacking great horns sticking out over its eyes: It's certainly a new species.
And I think there's an excellent chance that it's probably a new genus and species, so it's a major find Over the course of several days, they realize there's an entire community of ancient animals in the cave. They find eight new species of prehistoric kangaroo, and other lost animals that are many times bigger than their relatives today. It's an unprecedented discovery. It's one of the most important finds ever made in the history of Australian paleontology. There's never been a cache of fossils of this age—complete skeletons scattered around the cave floor—so it's given us an excellent window into the fauna of a massive part of Australia, about which we previously knew nothing.
But just as they had feared, poachers have been here. In one part of the cave, there's evidence that poachers arrived before they did and raided some of the fossils. It hasn't taken long for the cave to start to be trashed. You've got tire marks going in there and then tracks all the way along, then you go to this cave and there's been people in there.
Some of the specimens there were disarticulated. But not only that, we don't have the complete picture. When we start logging and mapping each bone by bone, some of the puzzle's missing. So it's just not good. Could the poachers have already stolen the skeleton from the email? Hours of searching pass, and then one member of the team makes a promising discovery. I was just coming down the rock pile here, and I saw, down the slots, the larger bones of the legs.
Then I came around to get a better look, and there I saw some bones. Oh yeah, look at that. There are some big bones there that look like the leg limb bones, and also vertebrae, and a bit of hip and possibly the other lower jaw. They immediately recognize that these bones are fragments of a giant extinct lion—a tantalizing clue, but not a complete skeleton. Then, the moment they've been hoping for. They find the bones from the email, the first complete head-to-toe skeleton of Thylacoleo carnifex ever discovered.
I will never forget that moment, as long as I live, when I first laid eyes on the Thylacoleo skeleton. There it was, in reality, not just an image on a computer screen. I was totally gobsmacked, just entirely exhilarated from the inside out. It was a complete skeleton of Australia's largest marsupial killer.
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Every bone is still in place. The skeleton has been resting here in the darkness for thousands of years. It was really quite poignant, because it was possible to tell just from, sort of, looking at the way the skeleton was laid out that that animal had taken its last breath exactly where it was lying. And you can just imagine it wandering along in the dark, dying of thirst or perhaps soft tissue injuries, collapsing, exhausted, and dying.
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It was quite remarkable. It's been a breakthrough day for the team. The find is a landmark in Australian paleontology. There's still a lot of work to do, and not a lot of time. They have an intense two weeks ahead of them as they face the challenge of bringing the precious skeleton to the surface. Deep in the cave again, they begin to examine the bones more closely and there's more good news. The skeleton is untouched, lying exactly where the animal perished.
It's a pristine find. It's never been tampered with, and it gives us scientists the opportunity to go in, and not only to study the bones before we touch them, but to take samples for dating or ancient DNA. And we know there's no contamination down there, and that's very important for the science. They take samples for dating, because they want to know exactly how old the skeleton is. It looked so well-preserved, I was thinking it might only be a few thousand years.
It might be one of the youngest skeletons of megafauna yet discovered. They'll also try to recover ancient DNA from the bones, to look for clues about how Thylacoleo relates to modern species. In modern creatures, it's easy to take a tissue sample and extract the DNA out of it. But when we look at fossils, it's often difficult to get DNA, unless you get very good preservation. Unfortunately, we didn't get any DNA out of those bones. But then the reason why became obvious when the dating results came in. The skeleton was far older than we'd ever imagined.
It wasn't a few thousand years; it wasn't a few tens of thousands of years; it was probably half a million to a million years old. The skeleton's age and excellent condition make it even more valuable than the researchers had hoped, providing intimate details of the extinct lion's anatomy and behavior.
Okay, what I have here is the first-ever assembled tail of Thylacoleo , the marsupial lion. This is the only specimen known that had the tail complete. What you see is they had a long and muscular and powerful tail, the sort of tail befitting an animal that was an active predator. Before they can get the bones back to the lab, they need to prepare them carefully. One false move and the precious Thylacoleo skeleton could disintegrate before their eyes.
The skeleton was so fragile. Now, had someone actually tried to pick up the skull at that stage, it probably would have just fallen apart in their hands or fallen to dust, because it was very, very delicate. They spend days brushing on a special glue to harden the bones.
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It's a tedious job, but they have to do it before they can even pick up any of the bones. After four days of painstaking work preparing the skull, today, we're finally able to pick it up and look at it in its entirety. And what we see is the powerful dentition: And when we look at the lower jaw, we see a similar arrangement: The skull indicates that Thylacoleo 's bite was incredibly powerful, equivalent to that of a modern lion, more than twice its size. As the team continues to explore deeper into the cave, they find more specimens of the fearsome beast. This is the eleventh Thylacoleo we've found in these caves, so far.
And every specimen gives us new information that other material doesn't show. This particular animal came down in the cave and probably got wedged right here between the rocks. The head of the animal was here, and the front part of the arms fell down here. The unprecedented haul of bones poses an unexpected problem for the team.
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They can't possibly take all the fossils back to Perth. There is this whole question of cave security and whether other people will get in and pinch bones and walk all over it. I'd still feel better if we at least got some of the better specimens, and we mark exactly where they came from. Yeah, it's a big job. But it's a question of do you want to get the information that's available here out, or do we just want to scoop the goodies off the top and leave it at that? These fossils haven't even been studied or described, and there's whole new species here, so the loss of knowledge, the loss of natural heritage is the main concern to me.
They decide to take the eight new species of kangaroo, and several Thylacoleo specimens, including the rare intact skeleton. John Long personally tags and wraps each fragile bone for the journey back to the museum. We numbered every single bone in the skeleton. We took loads of photographs documenting the relationship of every bone. And we very carefully hauled it up in drums on a rope to the top of the cave. But there's still one final hurdle. The difference in air pressure above and below the ground makes the wind howl through this narrow opening. One wrong move and their precious cargo could be smashed to bits against the limestone rock.
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Fortunately, their treasure makes the trip safely. It's been a long, hard three weeks. But the journey of discovery will take a surprising turn as they return home to the museum to start a new exploration of Thylacoleo.
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With the priceless skeleton back in Perth, John Long's colleagues from the Western Australian Museum join the investigation. In the lab, they'll be able to conduct a meticulous study of Thylacoleo , from head to toe. Finding a complete skeleton of a marsupial lion is far more important than having hundreds and hundreds of isolated bits and pieces from different localities, because, for a start, we can build up an accurate picture of what the animal was like, and its real proportions.
And we can also start to look at its functional morphology—how that animal operated as a creature. You know, how did its feeding mechanism work? How did its hands and feet work? How much movement was there in its shoulder and its backbone? And from these studies we can then start to build up a realistic idea of Thylacoleo as a living animal.
Nineteenth century naturalists were the first to identify and describe Thylacoleo bones, and even with only fragments to go on, they realized how unusual a creature it was. Sir Richard Owen described this animal back in —the time Charles Darwin had just written his book on the evolution—as "the fellest of predatory beasts," and he called it Thylacoleo carnifex. Thylacis for pouch, leo for lion, carnae for meat and fex for cutting. So this was the "meat-cutting marsupial lion. But the name raised more questions than it answered.
Marsupials share the characteristic feature of a pouch the females use to nurture their young. The specific bone structure needed to support a pouch in marsupials has been found in Thylacoleo skeletons. Some marsupials live in other parts of the world, but Australia's geographic isolation contributed to the evolution of many unique species, like wombats, koalas and kangaroos.
So the perplexing question is how did Thylacoleo , the extinct "meat-cutting lion," come to share features of both marsupials and big cats? This is one of the most fascinating mammals, I think, that's ever been discovered. Rod Wells has been studying Thylacoleo most of his career.
The best fossils he's had up 'til now are bits and pieces of skulls and teeth. So he starts his investigation of the new, complete skeleton with the parts he knows best, and right away he finds surprises. This huge, single cutting tooth here, or premolar tooth, and this large premolar tooth, cutting premolar tooth, up here, are unprecedented in the mammalian world. If we go to the front of the jaw, here, we have these two front teeth that extend here—a condition that is known as diprotodonte, Di for two, proto: Things like possums and wombats and kangaroos and koalas all have this diprotodont condition.
So here we have an animal that seems to be telling us, with one set of teeth, that it comes from a herbivore ancestry, and with another set of teeth, it's telling us it's a carnivore. Most of Thylacoleo 's marsupial relatives today are plant eaters, but it seems clear that it was a hunter, like other lions.
I'd like a high resolution scan, one millimeter slices. Since this skull is so well preserved, it promises to deliver clues that have eluded previous researchers. Mark Walters is a doctor who uses forensic techniques to rebuild shattered human faces and skulls. Today he's using a CT scanner for a different kind of detective work. For the first time, he will peer deep inside Thylacoleo 's skull, and try to reconstruct the creature's ancient brain.
CT data provides us with a stack of images, and we can bring those into the computer, and then we can create geometrical files. And from those geometrical files we can do a number of different types of manipulations, including taking a cast of the internal surface of the bones. The CT images are transformed into a plastic replica of the skull. Then Walters takes a set of precise measurements of the interior cavity. The final result is a remarkable three-dimensional cast of Thylacoleo 's brain. There's a lot of information that can be derived from such a cast.
We can see, quite clearly, the lumps and bumps on the bone. And they correspond to different parts of the brain. Well, the very first thing and obvious structure is that we see these very large olfactory lobes. So this animal is going to be able to detect its specific smells over very long distances. Also we can see the parts of the brain associated with sight. And we can also see the big nerves that go to the eyes.