A giant lizard one thousand times the size of its living relatives and covered in thick armour once roamed Australia.
In fact, the lizard was so big it has been nicknamed ‘Chonkasaurus’ and ‘Mega Chonk’.
Tiliqua frangens was a type of skink, which nowadays are small, slender lizards – the smallest weighing only about two grams.
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But before they went extinct 47,000 years ago, the ‘Chonkasaurus’ weighed in at up to one kilogram, and grew to the size of a human arm.
However, unlike its miniature descendents, Frangens did not have a detachable tail.
‘Frangens was 1,000 times bigger than the common Australian garden skink and has a unique chunky, spiked profile,’ said lead author Dr Kailah Thorn, from the Western Australian Museum who studied the fossils as part of her PhD at Flinders University.
‘It reveals that even small creatures were supersized during the Pleistocene.’
Australia is famous for its weird wildlife, and during the Pleistocene Frangens lived alongside marsupial lions, short-faced kangaroos and diprotodons, which are best described as a cross between a koala and a bear.
The latest addition to this giant parade was pieced together from bones excavated at Wellington Caves in New South Wales and fossils in museum collections across the country.
‘In the dig at Wellington Caves we started finding these spiked armoured plates that had surprisingly never been recorded before,’ said co-author Dr Diana Fusco, from the Flinders University Palaeontology Laboratory.
‘We knew we had something interesting and unique.’
One stand-out feature was its incredibly strong jaw, which prompted the name Frangens, which in Latin means to break into pieces or smash.
‘These large, slow armoured lizards might have filled the ecological niche of small land tortoises, absent from modern Australia,’ said co-author Professor Michael Lee, from Flinders University and South Australian Museum.
The timing of Frangens’ extinction matches that of megafauna that disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene, suggesting widespread species loss.
‘Deciphering how Pleistocene animals adapted, migrated, or what eventually caused their extinctions might help us conserve today’s fauna, which faces pressures such as changing climate and habitat destruction,’ added Dr Thorn.
The paper is published in Proceedings Of The Royal Society B.
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