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Australian researchers have unearthed the remains of a giant hippo-like creature near Alice Springs, a find that promises to shed new light on the Northern Territory’s archaeological past.
Img: Flinders University. Credit: Cyberjunkie.
Scientists from the NT Museum and Flinders University made the discovery of jawbones of four Zygomaturus gilli, a species related to the giant hippo-like animal that roamed Australia up to 45,000 years ago, at a 7 million-year-old fossil site near Alcoota, 180km northeast of Alice Springs, said a Flinders news release.
Dr Gavin Prideaux from Flinders University said the new discovery provided researchers with an window to the Territory’s past which would help science fix the date of the site where the creature was found. He added that it would give an important insight into “how much there is to learn just at the one site, let alone the whole of Australia.”
“One of the problems with Alcoota is that we’ve never been able to date it directly,” Dr Prideaux said.
“These Zygomaturus gilli specimens give us a strong tie in with similar specimens found at a site to the south of Melbourne that have been dated at about 5 ˝ million years. It is going to help us lock Alcoota in to a tighter timeframe,” he explained.
However he warned that piecing together the whole of Australia’s fossil past was a mammoth job and it was dangerous to make assumptions based on one fossil find.
“The reality is we know perhaps one percent of Australia’s fossil history. It’s like having ten pieces in a 1000-piece jigsaw; there’s a great temptation to reconstruct the picture based on those pieces, but the likelihood is that we’ll almost certainly get it wrong.”
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