BEAR SIZED WOMBATS

WASHINGTON: A powerfully built relative of modern wombats that was the size of a black bear roamed Australia’s woodlands about 25 million years ago, possessing shovel-shaped hands and strong forelimbs indicating it was an adept digger, scientists said on Thursday.

The plant-eating mammal called Mukupirna nambensis, known from the fossil of a partial skull and much of the skeleton unearthed at Lake Pinpa in northeastern South Australia state, is one of the earliest-known large-bodied Australian marsupials, they said.

Mukupirna, meaning “big bones” in the local Aboriginal language, provides insight into the evolution of a marsupial group called vombatiforms that includes koalas and wombats. It was a cousin of wombats - distinctive muscular and short-legged animals and boasts skeletal traits showing the beginnings of wombat features such as adaptations for digging, though probably was unable to burrow.