GIANT MONITORS

Evening Star, Issue 19406, 15 November 1926, Page 3

GIANT MONITORS

AUSTRALIAN ANCESTRY Just as interesting as an attempt to discover the dispersal routs of marsupials may be the attempt to trace the ancestral home of the wonderful giant monitors lately discovered in the lsland of Komodo, in the Malay Archipelago (writes F. Chapman, A.L.S., in the Melbourne ‘Argus’). About sixtyeight years ago Professor Sir Richard Owen, the pahcontologist, examined a collection of bones from the Condamino River, Queensland, which had been purchased for the British Museum. He compared three vertebrae from this collection with those of the great lace lizard (Varanus) of Australia, and ho came to the conclusion that these Pleistocene fossils of the Condamine were the remains of an animal of not less than 20ft in length. Later other remains came into the hands of Professor Owen from Darling Downs and Melbourne, the Melbourne remains being some sacral vertebrae and an expanded end of a scapula. It would he interesting to know the exact locality of thk discovery in Melbourne. Further specimens were handed to Professor Owen by Dr George F. Bennett, from King’s Creek, Darling Downs, including the anterior portion of a skull. This skull, although referred to the same giant lizard by Professor Owen, was later by the researches of Dr Arthur Smith Woodward found to bo referable to the horned tortoise Meiolania. The teeth of the giant lizard, originally described by Professor Owen under the name of Notosnurns Dentatus, have also been found as fossils in New South Wales at Caddie’s Springs. As late as 1917 Mr Robert Etheridge, jun., whose recent death all scientists deplore, cleared up many of the early discrepancies, and showed that the dentary described by Professor Owen _ belonged to tho same form as the giant Megalania of Queensland. Professor Owen had previously remarked that Megalania had never been found in cave deposits, hut Air Etheridge, in _ tho same paper, showed that Megalania prisca was an inhabitant of caves t< Ho says; “ A few months ago I received a small consignment of bones from the ossiferous deposits at the Wellington Caves Reserve. . , , From vugs and vertical crevices, possibly leading to unexploVod cave cnambers and shaft exploration, a large quantity of ossiferous material in red cave earth has been extracted.”

There is little doubt, then, that this cave-dwelling giant is closely related to the fearsomo_ beast on the _ island _ of Komodo. This is the more interesting when we consider the prophetic utterance of Professor Owen delivered before the Royal Society of London sixty-two years ago, when he said: “Whether among the vast and unexplored wildernesses. of the Australian continent any living representative of the more truly gigantic Megalama, still lingers may be a question worth the attention of travellers. But more probably, like the gigantic marsupials, Diprotodon and Nototherium, with whose fossil remains those of. Hegalania were associated in tertiary . deposits now cut through_ by the _ Condnmine and its tributaries, the_ gigantic land lizard has long been extinct.” Professor Owen compared the proccelous (hollowed in front) _ vertebrae with those of the gigantic extinct sea lizards, Mosasaurus and Leiodon... As for the migration of this gigantic lizard from Australia to Malaysia, it seems to have required an earlier start than in the Pleistocene era, for by that time there had already occurred the gigantic Continental break named by Huxley “Wallace’s line,” which passes through the Lombok Passage in a northerly gnd

easterly direction, a lino of deep water lately modified by Merrill into a more directly north and south line. It is just possible, however, that some slight land connection was still maintained' between tho Australian and the Asian Continents until the Pleistocene, though this is a matter for the palaepgeographej to settle. '