Tag : Kangaroos

Washington: Researchers found Extinct kangaroos used methods other than their famous hop. The study was published in Journal, 'Alcheringa An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.' Although hopping is regarded as the pinnacle of kangaroo evolution, the researchers point out that other types of large kangaroos likely moved in different ways in the not-too-distant past, such as striding on two legs or traversing on all fours. The team demonstrates in the review, published in Alcheringa, that there are other ways to be an evolutionary successful large kangaroo and that large-bodied kangaroos were not only specialised in endurance-hopping. The review is an extensive discussion of the fossil evidence of kangaroos and their relatives' locomotion over the last 25 million years, and it presents new analyses of limb bone and ankle bone metric data that add weight to previous locomotor hypotheses. They suggested that the higher speed-endurance hopping characteristic of modern large-bodied kangaroos was likely rare or absent in all but a few large-bodied lineages, including the direct ancestors of modern large kangaroos such as red and grey kangaroos. The diversity of kangaroo gaits, however, vanished with the Late Pleistocene extinctions of larger animals (both in Australia and on other continents). While almost all kangaroos today, small and large, use hopping gaits to some extent, the fossil record reveals that the locomotory capabilities of some extinct kangaroos were comparatively diverse. The earliest recognized late Oligocene-middle Miocene (25 to 15 million years ago) basal types of kangaroos most likely employed quadrupedal bounding, climbing and slower speed hopping as their primary modes of locomotion. (All kangaroos today use quadrupe ...