Paleo Profile: Ganguroo robustiter

Queensland Museum paleontologist Bernard Cooke and colleagues have named the species Ganguroo robustiter. This is the third species named in the genus, and, thanks to a great collection of skulls and postcrania, is now the best known of the three. It’s also the biggest. While these were still relatively small hoppers – about the size of small wallabies – Ganguroo robustiter was more robust than the species that preceded it. This might indicate, Cooke and coauthors write, that the newly-named species was part of a trend towards increasing body size in response to changing habitats during the Miocene. Exactly what those changes were, however, are still held secret in the rock record.

Cooke, B., Travouillon, K., Archer, M., Hand, S. 2015.

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