15‑kg Giant Echidna Fossil Found After 100 Years
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- Owen’s giant echidna — a Pleistocene monotreme weighing up to 15 kg and about 1 m long — was identified from a skull fragment in a tray of unsorted fossils collected in 1907 from Foul Air Cave, East Gippsland.
- Tim Ziegler, collection manager of vertebrate palaeontology at Museums Victoria, first recognized the fragment as an echidna beak in 2021 and led the research that confirmed it belonged to Megalibgwilia owenii.
- Museums Victoria employed 3‑D scanning of modern and historic echidna specimens from across Australia to verify the identification and to compare the giant echidna’s robust limb morphology with that of living long‑beaked echidnas.
- Foul Air Cave, the original excavation site in the Buchan cave complex, yielded the fossil over a century ago but the specimen remained hidden in storage until its recent rediscovery.
- Alcheringa published the study, noting that the find closes a roughly 1,000 km gap in the known distribution of the species and shows it once inhabited temperate, forested Victoria.
- The fossil’s limb bones display deeper muscle scars and larger ligament attachments, suggesting the giant echidna could exert greater force when digging for prey or tearing bark, unlike its modern relatives.
Why it matters: Palaeontologists and museums gain a crucial data point that closes a 1,000 km distribution gap for the extinct giant echidna, reshaping reconstructions of Pleistocene habitats in temperate Victoria and highlighting the value of re‑examining historic collections. It also underscores how overlooked specimens can illuminate evolutionary pathways and inform broader ecological studies.
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