A 'heavy metal' lizard roamed Australia 47,000 years ago. This giant skink, named 'megachunk' or 'chunksaurus', was an armored tank among reptiles and gives insights into the rich biodiversity of ancient Australia. Paleontology Australia
Among these more famous discoveries, researchers also found other armored bones; they appeared to come from a skink species, but were often thrown into “miscellaneous bone boxes” in the rush and more or less forgotten over time.
species. The smaller ones likely belong to skinks that were relatively young at the time of their deaths. Others had the kind of overgrown bones you often see in older individuals — or, in one case, “a big, old, gnarly-toothed guy,” Thorn says.Once Thorn and her colleagues gathered enough bones, they found that many fit together quite nicely.
Its nearest living relative is the shingleback skink, a large individual itself in the skink world. These skinks are unique in“It really broadens our ideas of skink body shapes — the sizes they were able to reach and their lifestyle,” Thorn says. Thorn says that these ancient skinks probably ate tough plant matter, similar to shinglebacks and desert tortoises. They would have fit a similar niche to the latter, as a slow-moving desert herbivore. The fossil evidence hasn’t yet revealed what ate them in turn, but Thorn says their spines would likely have dissuaded many predators.It’s possible that extremely large Tasmanian devils, which were still present on the Australian mainland around this time, might have gone for them.
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