The ‘Nimbadon’ bears were adept at climbing trees; information from fossil skeletons

Despite being extinct from the earth thousands of years ago, the existence of living beings does not end. By deeply studying the fossil skeletons of such creatures, we can understand their lifestyle, their food system, their movement shield and their evolutionary sequence. It can be said that these fossil skeletons are a kind of binoculars by peeping through which we reach the world of these creatures thousands of years ago. By analyzing the different elements of fossil bones, we can not only find out the overall size of that organism, but also know its gait, its lifestyle, and we can also know what kind of environment it lived in. I lived in

But what if fossils peep inside the bones? What secrets can they reveal about the evolution of an extinct organism? In a new study published in the ‘Journal of Paleontology’, we have done so by studying a 15-million-year-old fossil of a giant bear-like marsupial from the world-famous ‘Riversleigh World Heritage Area’ in the Vanay region of northwestern Queensland. (A marsupial is any animal in which the female carries her young in a pouch on her belly.) The tree-dwelling marsupial was called ‘Nimbadon’ and weighed about 70 kg. It was the largest tree-dwelling mammal known from Australia.

Nimbadon belongs to a different group of long-extinct giant marsupials called diprotodontoids. Among them are the big animals that once lived on the earth. They include 2.5 tonnes of Diprotodon. In modern fauna, Nimbadon is closely related to the ‘wombat’. But it is still a matter of great surprise that in terms of body size and lifestyle, they are very similar to the brown bear found in Southeast Asia, which can be seen climbing trees in the rain forests of Southeast Asia today.

When we first found the jaw bones of Nimbadon at Riversleigh in 1993, we thought it was a leaf-eating marsupial that roamed the forests in search of food. But we found that the deeper we studied the species we had found so far at Riversleigh, the more strange and fascinating things we discovered about them. Now we know the complete skeleton of Nimbadon. We have understood the various stages of its development journey from its infancy in the pouch to its becoming a full-fledged adult organism. We have come to know that along with strong arms, his shoulder and elbow joints were very flexible.

To climb trees it had curved palms and claws that were able to penetrate the bark of trees and grab onto branches. We also know that these creatures were adept at climbing trees and led very different lives from their closest contemporary, the earth-dwelling wombat. Nimbadon lived in the lowlands of the Australian rain forests 15 million years ago. These lush forests full of biodiversity used to be home to some equally strange animals, such as meat-eating kangaroos, tree-climbing crocodiles, ancestral thylacines, cat- to leopard-sized marsupial lions, giant anacondas, giant The toothy platypus and the mysterious marsupial.

It was very different from the Australia we see today. Studying the Bones We removed a segment from the shaft of the Nimbadon bone and immersed it in a solution. Using sharp edged blades, we cut our samples into thin pieces and polished them until light could pass through them. These fragments were mounted on glass microscope slides for study. What was surprising was that even after being fossilized for millions of years, the microscopic structure of the fossilized bones remained intact. We were surprised to find that nimbadone increased exponentially over time. Some showed rapid growth and then the rate of growth was found to be slow. Now we are studying its teeth to understand its diet.

Disclaimer:IndiaTheNews has not edited this news. This news has been published from PTI-language feed.

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