EXTINCT^GIANT KANGAROOS 325 



This kangaroo must have stood about eight feet high ; 

 it was therefore very much larger, and perhaps double 

 the weight of the largest existing species. This, of course, 

 is not a remarkable size compared with other great 

 extinct kangaroos, but it is worthy of note, as it was 

 undoubtedly one of the oldest specimens yet discovered 

 on the continent. 



Kangaroos, however, were not the largest animals that 

 formerly roamed the wide plains of Australia. On the 

 Darling Downs I found, at a depth of twenty feet and in 

 superficial deposit, the greatest part of the skeleton, 

 including all but a few bones of the skull, of a gigantic 

 animal recognised by the curator of Sydney Museum, as 

 diprotodon australis. This monstrous creature has been 

 described by Huxley as " a kangaroo-like animal " ; but it 

 differs greatly in many respects from the modern group 

 of kangaroos. It may have been a true marsupial, though 

 of that I have some doubt ; but the proportions of its 

 limbs, and its exceedingly massive build generally, show 

 at once that in habits as well as in form it was a very 

 different creature to the kangaroo of our day. It certainly 

 must have had a different way of locomotion to that of 

 the modern members of the genus, as the limbs were not at 

 all adapted to hopping, and the animal must have weighed 

 from fifteen to twenty tons : that is, it was very much larger 

 than any existing animal. 



There are remains of several other giant animals to be 

 found in all the colonies of our continent, some of which 

 were far more kangaroo-like than the diprotodon. Com- 

 plete skeletons of any of these I have not been so 

 fortunate as to find ; but skulls, or parts of skulls, and odd 

 bones found in the north-west near the rivers Murchison 

 and Gascoyne, and in the Port Darwin district, convinced 

 me that there were formerly, and quite as recently as the 

 pliocene period, true kangaroos which probably stood nine 

 or ten feet high, and weighed, approximately, six tons or 

 more. Anybody who has heard the heavy thumping of 

 even small species of kangaroos as they hop about during 

 the stillness of night, will be able to form some notion of 



