Marsupial Graveyard

Name: diprotodon. Age: uncertain. Domicile: Australia. Physical characteristics: looks like a rhinoceros but has a pouch like a kangaroo. These are the vital specifications of one of the strangest prehistoric beasts known. Henceforth, thanks to Ruben A. Stirton, professor of paleontology at the University of California, scientists will learn a lot more about the diprotodon than the few fragmentary facts which, in the past, enabled them to put together only a vague sort of passport picture.

For months Stirton has been poking around in the dry northeastern corner of South Australia, in a place where fossil bones had been reported. Last week, back in Adelaide, he told about a major find: the skeletons of 500 to 1,000 diprotodons, entombed just beneath the desert surface. He brought back one skeleton, the first ever found complete, and parts of two others.

When Australia was first cut off by the sea from the rest of the world many million years ago, its only mammals were marsupials, whose young are born tiny and undeveloped and must be nursed along in a pouch. The primitive marsupials were probably like modern opossums. But they had Australia to themselves, and, protected from the competition of the fiercer placental mammals, they evolved in many directions and duplicated almost every type that the placentals produced in other parts of the world. Besides the familiar kangaroos (equivalent in habits to deer or antelopes), there are still pouched carnivora and pouched marsupial moles.

The diprotodons, the marsupial equivalents of large, slow-moving, herbivorous beasts such as tapirs, lumbered inoffensively through the lush vegetation that covered Australia at the end of the last glacial period, and they managed to stay alive long enough to be seen and possibly eaten by the first primitive men to reach Australia. But Australia began to have the long droughts that it still suffers today, and this was hard on the diprotodons, which were neither bright nor adaptable.

A herd of them, searching desperately for water, must have lumbered out on the caked floor of a dried-up lake. The crust broke and lowered them into soft, smothering clay. Then sediment covered their skeletons and preserved them perfectly. There. Dr. Stirton came upon remains of the great, out-of-date beasts, some of them with their legs doubled under them as they waited for death. He hopes that more digging will turn up, among other things, the delicate skeletons of baby diprotodons that were smothered in their mothers' pouches when they sank into the mud.

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