I was curious as to what kind of megafauna might have existed in Australia's past. Diprotodon is one of the answers, and an interesting one at that. Not quite on the scale of the larger mammoths and mastodons in North America, but imposing from the human perspective. The reconstructions make them look a little like a cross between a wombat and a moose.
They existed alongside humans for millennia after the latter arrived, so it's not like they were immediately hunted into extinction. The expansion of the continent's deserts might have had something to do with it. In any case, I wonder how they're reflected in Aboriginal folklore.
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Well, that was interesting - the largest marsupial that ever existed looks to have been a pretty fascinating beast. I found an article about them on Thought.co that discusses how they ended up going extinct and also that Diprotodons may have been the snimals the Aboriginal people call the bunyip. So I looked up bunyip and found the following:
From The Encyclopedia Britannica:
Bunyip, in Australian Aboriginal folklore, a legendary monster said to inhabit the reedy swamps and lagoons of the interior of Australia. The amphibious animal was variously described as having a round head, an elongated neck, and a body resembling that of an ox, hippopotamus, or manatee; some accounts gave it a human figure. The bunyip purportedly made booming or roaring noises and was given to devouring human prey, especially women and children. The origin of the belief probably lies in the rare appearance of fugitive seals far upstream; the monster’s alleged cry may be that of the bittern marsh bird.
Although the Aborigines may well have hunted the creatures it seems to me they would have been unlikely to slaughter them en masse. More likely that they hunted out of need but otherwise respected the Diprotodons a similar fashion as the No. American plains indians did the buffalo.
It's an interesting question. Where do mythical creatures come from? That is, where do the idea of them come from? Most of them are, strictly speaking, fictional. Which is to say they don't entirely match up to any animal that you'll find in nature. But to attract belief and become public property in the way they do, there has to be more of it than their just being a weird idea. So it makes sense that they might have multiple sources. I could see the Bunyip, for example, having attributes of a number of real creatures, some extinct and some not.
I very much agree with you that the Aborigines wouldn't have intentionally mass-slaughtered the Diprotodon. Doing so would have been against their interests. There's a theory about the North American megafauna that they died out with the migration of humans from Asia, who had honed their skills hunting creatures that were in the process of evolving to be a tougher hunt. North American animals had been out of the loop so were easier picking than the humans had realized. Whether this is true for either continent I don't know. Another factor to take into consideration is that sudden environmental changes (e.g. droughts) can upset the human/animal balance of power.
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