Scientists
have discovered a new species of pig-footed bandicoot — an extinct
Australian marsupial that
looks like a kangaroo, an opossum and a deer got a bit too friendly at the
local watering hole — and it's about as strange as you'd hope.
Pig-footed
bandicoots are long-eared, long-tailed herbivores that
once scurried about the sandy, arid stretches of central and western Australia
for tens of thousands of years before going extinct in the 1950s. Maxing out
with a body mass of about 1.3 pounds (600 grams; roughly the weight of a
basketball) and a length of about 10 inches (26 centimeters), these mammals are
considered to be among the smallest grazing animals that ever lived, according
to the authors of a new study published March 13 in the journal Zootaxa.
With two
functional toes on their front legs and only one on each hind leg, the
bandicoots have a bit of an assembled-by-committee look. However, according to interviews conducted
with aboriginal tribe members in the 1980s, the tripod toe arrangement did not
hinder the little beasts from "galloping" at surprisingly high speeds
when distressed.
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