Extinct 'Pig-Footed Bandicoot' Galloped Around Australia Like a Wonky Little Horse

By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | March 25, 2019 04:01pm ET

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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Tiniest grazing mammal was a pig at the front, horse at the back

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By Alice Klein

Species: Pig-footed bandicoot, Chaeropus ecaudatus
Habitat: Australia

It had a bizarre set of horse-like hind feet and pig-like fore feet, but it looked like a rat. A collection of fossils gathering dust on a back shelf has yielded new insights into one of Australia’s most mysterious marsupials, the pig-footed bandicoot, which went extinct in the 1950s.

It is the smallest grazing mammal ever documented, weighing about 200 grams, and had several unique features – including its feet. And it seems its grazing abilities evolved unusually quickly.

Kenny Travouillon at the Western Australian Museum in Perth studied three fossil teeth that had been languishing in the museum’s collection since they were dug up in New South Wales in the 1970s.

He found that Chaeropus ecaudatus evolved from an earlier omnivorous species – C. baynesi – which lived in Australia two million years earlier.

A rapidly drying climate may have prompted the switch to grazing, but two million years is an unusually short time frame, Travouillon says. “Evolution of diets usually takes many millions of years.”

Adding to the mystery is the fact that small mammals do not normally graze, he says. “They don’t have big enough stomachs to digest grass for a long time to extract the little nutrients.”

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