Giant wombat graveyard found in Australia

Australian scientists have uncovered the skeletons of more than four dozen “giant wombats,” extinct creatures that are believed to have been the largest marsupials ever to roam the Earth.

The find, in Queensland, Australia, of about 50 diprotodons, believed to be between 100,000 and 200,000 years old, has been called a “paleontologists’ goldmine,” according to the BBC.

The plant-eating giants grew to the size of a rhinoceros and had backward-facing pouches big enough to carry an adult human, the report added.

“When we did the initial survey I was just completely blown away by the concentrations of these fragments,” said lead scientist Scott Hocknull, from the Queensland Museum in Brisbane.

“It’s a paleontologists’ goldmine where we can really see what these megafauna were doing, how they actually behaved, what their ecology was,” he added. “With so many fossils it gives us a unique opportunity to see these animals in their environment, basically, so we can reconstruct it.”

Diprotodons were part of a group of unusual species collectively called the “Australian megafauna.” They existed from approximately 1.6 million years ago until extinction around 46,000 years ago.