ANCIENT RELICS

Manawatu Standard, Volume IV, Issue 222, 20 August 1931, Page 12

ANCIENT RELICS

AUSTRALIAN DISCOVERY.

The question, what manner was Australia ’250,000 « prompted the other day with the rival at the Australian Museum, m Sydney, of the massive jawbone , large, fantastic animal tha Australia in the long J ears m f 16 bank during digging opeiation vYillow of a creek near a P’f ° c ' K Tree (between Murrudundi r Creek) in New South Males, th ( were those of a nototherium, or ma SU The flourished all over Australia, and occurred aLo m. A tralia before that island was severed from the mainland. W . J?. orn bat diprotodon, the so-called gm +hvla(as large as a rhinoceros) and thyta coleo, the marsupial tiger. « 1 er possible to say just when these quee animals arose, or when they disappeared. Their remains have not been found in tertiary strata, and so-it is surmised that they develop „ 1,000,000 vears ago and were gradual y wiped out about 20.000 years ago. 1 1 the latter part of this surmise rect it is probable that the 1° . . . mals existed when the first aboriginals arrived in Australia. . , „ The nototherium, whose jawbone now reposes in the museum, was one or three or four different kinds. Roughly about the size of a small bullock, it appears to have been a mg. clumsy creature, with a bulky body set on short legs, and a massive head ornamented with four short tusks on the iaws. It is fairly certain, howerer, that if males of the nototherium persuasion did any fighting. ™ among themselves. Their teeth i cate that they were purely vegetab - eating animals, and did not attack other mammals. Certainly they a not likely to have attacked men, though possibly they could, if cornered, fight in somewhat the manner of wounded tapirs.