ANCIENT RELICS

Hokitika Guardian, 11 August 1931, Page 8

ANCIENT RELICS

AUSTRALIAN DISCOVERY. BONES OF NOTOTHERIUM. SYDNEY, July 30. The question, what manner of place wa s Australia 250,000 yeans ago was prompted the other day with the arrival at the Australian Museum, in Sydney, of the massive jawbones of a large, fantastic animal that roamed Australia in the long years ago. Found during digging operation on the bank of a creek near a place called Willow Tree (between Murrudundi and Wends Creek) in New South "Wales, the bones were those of a nototherium, or “marsupial tapir.” The nototherium flourished all over Australia, and occurred also in Australia before that island was severed from the mainland. With, it were diprotodon, the so-called giant wombat (a s large as a rhinoceros) and tliyiacoleo, the marsupial tiger. It is not possible to .say just when these queer animals arose, or when they disappeared. Their remains have not been found in Tertiary strata, and so it is surmised that they developed about 1,000.000 years ago ami were gradually wiped out about 20,000 years ago. If the latter, part of this surmise is correct it is possible that the lost animals existed when the first aboriginals arrived in Australia.

The nototherium, whose jawbone now reposes in the museum, was one of three or four different kinds. Roughly about the size of a. small bullock, it appears to have been a slow moving, clumsy creature, with a bulky body set on short legs, and. a massive head ornamented with four short tusks on the jaws. It is fairly certain, however, that if males of the nototherium persuasion did any fighting it was onlv among themselves. Their teeth indicate that they were purely veg-etable-eating animals, ami did not attack other mammals. Certainly they are not likely to have attacked men, though possibly they could, if cornered, fight in somewhat the manner of wounded tapirs.