Linguists at the University of Western Australia, found an Aboriginal phrase that was translated as Drop Bear or Bear that fell from trees onto prey, which was connected to what they described as a Thylacaleo according oral history. So that's where the rumor came from the indigenous people themselves.
Translators regularly adapt the translation to make sense in the receiving language. "Bear" was for the receivers, the original could be "Brown thing, as big as Jimmy over there, falls from trees and kills". If you doubt me, see the hash English makes of Irish, which is full of wit and poetry in everyday language. Or better, Navajo.
Over forty years ago I read into an encyclopedia type book about the theory the black with white spots "Drop-down bear" was supposed to be a living Thylacoleo. Certainly earlier smaller versions of Thylacoleo would have hunted prehistoric tree kangaroos. The giant Thylacine would have been more capable of dominating ground hunting. As you pointed out the Thycoleo was built for hunting larger prey than itself and the best advantage against these super-large ground birds and rhino-sized Rhino would be to sneak up into a tree and wait for incoming herds to attack. As you pointed out there three types of super large land reptiles hunting on the ground: Quincana, Megalani and smaller but giant Komodo dragons. It would only be logical for an animal for predator with the thylacoleo to climb into a tree to avoid larger predators and use a tree for easier access to large and tall prey.
Thanks very much. And yes it does seem that there's a lot of talking heads and AI covering this. But pretty much nothing by practicing researchers in the field.
There really is a lot of misinformation. I think most paleo channels are being managed by folks who think research means checking Wikipedia. And very few have so much as a degree in paleontology let alone a research and publication record
I really wish I could see this complete skeleton in person. We known very little about how this predator lived or if it had any unique behaviors that are only associated in its species. Overall great video and I hope we get to find more new fossils of Australia’s other unique megafauna soon.
I think the coolest part of your talk was referring to the stuffed Thylacoleo you have on the wall behind you. It would take quite a big tree to support that animal. It is like imagining my 300 lb grandmother in a tree. Ain't gonna happen.
Yep they're big animals all right. The one on my wall is certainly a large specimen. Plenty would have been smaller. Mind you it's not the biggest either
@@RealPaleontology If o-rangs can travel in the trees then thylacoleo could manage it, right? Some male gorillas can climb up trees somewhat far too. I guess it depends on the species of tree?
I am not saying that they couldn’t climb trees, of course it could, but they couldn’t catch prey in the trees because all the prey up there is much smaller than them. And they could easily escape to breaches were too small to support the marsupial lion
thanks for the upload : I came across some road kill not related to this cat of course it was a grayish roo a female and 3 babes a male some 120M further along the road in the same condition i looked at this female and though there something different round ears it was a blood see i missed taking photos to remember it , i have sen since being on the peninsular more verity in size shape and colour in the rear sightings than 66 years on the east coast . same with emus but not to the same extent they are all extremely shy of loud noise like banging sound they put a top stringer of bard wire i was told to open up the emus neck ? I did fine one bones with its leg caught in a twisted fence so wonderful the homo sapiens wonderful people ,
@@RealPaleontology as i said what do you think when they have a top wire of barbed wire to cause injury , to keep then if "there " land which it is there land more than the psychopath homo sapiens the wonderful think man who one thinks of him self
I am from germany so austraila is extreme far away but if I can will go to see it on display I always wantet to see thylacoleo Near wich bigger city is it?
Yep it sure does. This is why for many decades some experts questioned whether or not it was a carnivore. You should check the episode I did on the marsupial lion a bit more information on this if you interested.
What a brushtail possum is to a pygmy possum, this thing is to a koala... and only a fool would tangle with a koala. Terrible that they were driven to extinction. I guess despite all their terrifying features, they must have had some exploitable weakness.
@@RealPaleontology Call me cynical, but, given that they were widespread and we still have plenty of megafauna today (including our own suspiciously abundant species), I kind of doubt it. It wasn't very different in size to us and even if I were an obligate carnivore, I'd have zero problem finding enough wallabies to live on. If they had anything like the sense of smell of a possum or a devil, you'd think the prey would have to go extinct before they'd all starve to death for want of it. Maybe they could be fed a kangaroo, then killed while they weren't in hunting mode. Humans happened to arrive right before mass extinctions all over the world and were strangely immune to all of the wild and wonderful extinction pressures that we can retcon to explain them. How clever of us. If only we'd gotten so good at ignoring elephant sized things in close proximity a little sooner, we might have actually earned some of the blamelessness that would seem to be the goal of the behaviour.
These are of course all points that have been made in the literature, they have also been contested in the literature. A be happy to send you some reviews
@ If you have any compelling evidence that the carnivores large enough to predate on humans all happened to starve to death right after our arrival, despite the wealth of still extant prey species, I'm sure I'd be fascinated. You'd think that if the early settlers were somehow averse to harming them, our arrival as an additional menu item would have been their salvation from the astronomically low odds that their lineage, which had survived for tens of millions of years, in a range of habitats, would become extinct within a few thousand years of that event.
The simple fact is that there is no 'proof' for either claim. But if you're not prepared to read the arguments from both sides that your business. Personally, my mind is open. Simple fact is we cannot tease out the relative significance of different factors in the extinctions that are happening today. This debate will continue for centuries I suspect. Quite possibly longer, and all on the basis of far less data than we have for current extinction processes.
Also when people are talking about the drop bear hypothesis they or meaning about dropping down onto large browsers to pounce on them *I don't really push that theory anymore I think they use their leaping ability to pounce on ground prey
@RealPaleontology I quit using that theory because I had studied the fauna of South Walker Creek and realized that the animals there could be killed without having to use tree dropping, since palorchestes was only the size of a bear or the giant kangaroos which have their Achilles heel in that tail
Also I apologize for my outright troll-like behavior on your previous video, I was immature I still disagree with the terror bird video but here's a more mature criticism, allometry wasn't accounted for, andalgalornis is of a different niche and build than the largest Terror birds so it makes sense why the biomechanics would show why IT wasn't designed for big prey so really, the skull at the back is significantly less broad, skull is proportionately smaller, less reinforced, the crest that reinforces the skull is larger Terror birds is smaller in andalgalornis, it hook tip is proportionally less prominent. Overall it was a poor lab rat for the larger Terror birds and if an opinion is to be formed the larger Terror birds must be used because the family is simply too diverse and too different in build amongst its members to use just one terror bird to make assumptions about the rest
@RealPaleontology if you do make the video on the ordovician look up these for sources "Eurypterids use tail to slash prey" "Megalograptus basket" "Endoceras incertae sedis" "Endoceras buoyancy DJ peterman " They should give you the information on Megalograptus and endoceras
Do you think this predator would stand up like a bear? Perhaps to get a better view or intimidate rivals. That tail would be very useful for that. I hope to visit Australia one day. Would absolutely love to see those fossils in person.
Maybe a lot of it's climbing adaptations were more for the babies. Perhaps it would stash it's young in trees while hunting. I imagine having a large Joey in the pouch would not be helpful when stalking prey. Could have been like a grizzly where the adults do very little climbing. Stashing food in trees like a leopard makes sense as well, altho after watching your megalania video I think thylocaleo probably ate the big lizard more often than the other way around.
I'm also curious if it is cooler on the ground or up in a tree in the Australian bush. The overpowered jaws of the marsupial lion would probably sheer right thru thick lizard and croc hides.
Once the young become too big to carry there almost certainly kept in a den. Certainly this is what other marsupial predators such as Quolls and Tasmanian devils do
2 questions one how do you think thylacoleo using that bite? like to break the neck or sever the throat, im betting on severing the throat. second has to do with the land croc quinkana, its an ignored animal. Im trying to determine the size of late pleistocene specimens (which are just teeth) now normally tooth based referall is questionable but they are ziphodont croc teeth identical to quinkana and quinkana is already known from the mid pleistocene and many taxa in australia lived through the early to late pleistocene so i dont see why quinkana couldnt. anyway, the size of quinkana is kind of debated. possible pliocene remains suggest a 20 ft size but those are debated. the type species is q fortirostrum and its skull was 34 cm long and most estimates place it at around 3m long. there was a blog spot that scaled up the king creek tooth to teeth from the holotype. They scaled using a skull reconstruction of the holotype and then a depiction of the king creek specimen, the king creek tooth was at least 1 in long and in the blogspot the skull of the king creek tooth was about 50 cm, after being scaled from the holotype skulls corresponding tooth. remember i said q fortirostrum had 34 cm skull and 3 m long body, which is skull to body length ratio of 1:8.8, by multiplying 50cm (the likely skull size of the king creek quinkana) by 8.8, my tentative estimate of the king creek quinkana is 4.4 meters long. do you think all of this is scientifically sound? given how poor the record is
The marsupial liion would have used different bites and killing techniques depending on the prey. I will do an episode on so-called terrestrial crocodiles and I'll talk about the sizes there!
I havent seen the movie Carnifex, but some shortcuts that I saw absolutely..... sucks. The dentition is completely failed. What is more impresive on Thylacoleo is dentitional formula 1/1 and 1/1 or so it seems; if I didnt overlook some. Both killing and eating with 4 teeth.
@RealPaleontology I took a pic of a print I found. Which had me combing internet searching for even a close match. 5 toed with retractable claws and the pad isn't like anything else. I had to take a few pics as I'd never seen anything like it. Could I send you pic ?
If the only reason the thylacaleo climbed trees was to takes it kill out of reach of other predators, what were those other predators which it could not deal with pound for pound?
Oh I also wanted to say on the subject of bite force. It's very hard to get an animal to bite as hard as they can to read the bite force.A friend of mine had a kitten like a year old and he's a big guy ,long story short,that kitchen bite him in the index finger knuckle it's tooth was completely buried in his knuckle ,hence animals can bite harder than expected!as always great show
I don't think it would drag the whole prey I mean if it's need for thick vegetation to ambush was anything this thing was going after the big browsers of the day which was like big ass kangaroos there's no way it could drag them into trees Instead it probably would have just cut off a body part like the leg or something and dragged that up into the tree
Very informative vid. I did notice the sound faded in and out (quiet, not silent) from time to time.
Yes, sorry about that. Problem with the microphone it turns out, but I have sorted it since.
Love the name, so great that it gives a nod to local people in the area where she was found
Hey thanks for that
This is amazing news! I'm going to go and see it for myself as soon as I can! IM SO EXCITED!!!!!!
Cool let me know what you think
Linguists at the University of Western Australia, found an Aboriginal phrase that was translated as Drop Bear or Bear that fell from trees onto prey, which was connected to what they described as a Thylacaleo according oral history. So that's where the rumor came from the indigenous people themselves.
Interesting thanks for the heads up look into it
Wait, how did indigenous Australians know about bears?
@@stephenballard3759 they didn't.
Translators regularly adapt the translation to make sense in the receiving language. "Bear" was for the receivers, the original could be "Brown thing, as big as Jimmy over there, falls from trees and kills". If you doubt me, see the hash English makes of Irish, which is full of wit and poetry in everyday language. Or better, Navajo.
@@AnamLiath excellent! Thank you very much.
Over forty years ago I read into an encyclopedia type book about the theory the black with white spots "Drop-down bear" was supposed to be a living Thylacoleo. Certainly earlier smaller versions of Thylacoleo would have hunted prehistoric tree kangaroos. The giant Thylacine would have been more capable of dominating ground hunting. As you pointed out the Thycoleo was built for hunting larger prey than itself and the best advantage against these super-large ground birds and rhino-sized Rhino would be to sneak up into a tree and wait for incoming herds to attack. As you pointed out there three types of super large land reptiles hunting on the ground: Quincana, Megalani and smaller but giant Komodo dragons. It would only be logical for an animal for predator with the thylacoleo to climb into a tree to avoid larger predators and use a tree for easier access to large and tall prey.
Can’t wait for more people to find your channel
Seems to be going pretty well thank you!
@ you’re welcome man. Love to see content with sources in the videos and an actual paleontologist put his thoughts and knowledge into the material
Thanks very much. And yes it does seem that there's a lot of talking heads and AI covering this. But pretty much nothing by practicing researchers in the field.
@ absolutely, a lot of misinformation being spread through people and channels not doing proper research
There really is a lot of misinformation. I think most paleo channels are being managed by folks who think research means checking Wikipedia. And very few have so much as a degree in paleontology let alone a research and publication record
I really wish I could see this complete skeleton in person. We known very little about how this predator lived or if it had any unique behaviors that are only associated in its species. Overall great video and I hope we get to find more new fossils of Australia’s other unique megafauna soon.
I think it'll be worth the trip.
And I do think that we've established a unique killing behavior through this beast
I think the coolest part of your talk was referring to the stuffed Thylacoleo you have on the wall behind you. It would take quite a big tree to support that animal. It is like imagining my 300 lb grandmother in a tree. Ain't gonna happen.
Yep they're big animals all right. The one on my wall is certainly a large specimen. Plenty would have been smaller. Mind you it's not the biggest either
@@RealPaleontology If o-rangs can travel in the trees then thylacoleo could manage it, right? Some male gorillas can climb up trees somewhat far too.
I guess it depends on the species of tree?
I am not saying that they couldn’t climb trees, of course it could, but they couldn’t catch prey in the trees because all the prey up there is much smaller than them. And they could easily escape to breaches were too small to support the marsupial lion
Why does this not have 10s of thousands of views?
Well, it's a very new channel... but it seems to be doing pretty darn good.
2:06 you, sir, underestimate the power of skepticism.
Being said I’m binge watching every video in this playlist lessgo
Hey that's fantastic! And please, the skeptical as you like and feel free to shoot me questions.
What an amazing find.
Sure is
Wow.
Thylacoleo becomes even more amazing!
Yep a truly awesome animal
Always wanted to visit south Australia and the nullarbor, more reason to! Shoutouts the band floodlights!
Definitely worth the trip!
This is a great find! Given all that's known about Thylacoleo Carnifex, I think it's appropriate to call it "The Climbing Wrestler."
I'll have to look that up in Latin!
Or combat wombat.
@@gaellongree4207 Ha! I like that.
thanks for the upload : I came across some road kill not related to this cat of course it was a grayish roo a female and 3 babes a male some 120M further along the road in the same condition i looked at this female and though there something different round ears it was a blood see i missed taking photos to remember it , i have sen since being on the peninsular more verity in size shape and colour in the rear sightings than 66 years on the east coast . same with emus but not to the same extent they are all extremely shy of loud noise like banging sound they put a top stringer of bard wire i was told to open up the emus neck ? I did fine one bones with its leg caught in a twisted fence so wonderful the homo sapiens wonderful people ,
That sounds rather sad
@@RealPaleontology as i said what do you think when they have a top wire of barbed wire to cause injury , to keep then if "there " land which it is there land more than the psychopath homo sapiens the wonderful think man who one thinks of him self
Not sure where you going with that?
How was Ngambaa's joey oriented in her pouch: head pointed forward or backward? I'm just curious.
That really is a fantastic and insightful question! Unfortunately, I don't have the answer. But I will try and chase it up.
I am from germany so austraila is extreme far away but if I can will go to see it on display I always wantet to see thylacoleo
Near wich bigger city is it?
Excellent it's in South Australia so Adelaide is the closest city
I have still in the package a figure of the thylacoleo by southland replicas and one out of the package 📦
Awesome might become a collect as item.
It's got crazy looking teeth for a predator, almost looks like beaver teeth.
Yep it sure does. This is why for many decades some experts questioned whether or not it was a carnivore. You should check the episode I did on the marsupial lion a bit more information on this if you interested.
Would Quinkana have been large enough to also potentially push a Thylacoleo off a kill?
Probably
What a brushtail possum is to a pygmy possum, this thing is to a koala... and only a fool would tangle with a koala.
Terrible that they were driven to extinction. I guess despite all their terrifying features, they must have had some exploitable weakness.
A terrible shine. The biggest weakness was probably that they needed large animals to eat. Once the prey disappeared they went with them
@@RealPaleontology Call me cynical, but, given that they were widespread and we still have plenty of megafauna today (including our own suspiciously abundant species), I kind of doubt it.
It wasn't very different in size to us and even if I were an obligate carnivore, I'd have zero problem finding enough wallabies to live on.
If they had anything like the sense of smell of a possum or a devil, you'd think the prey would have to go extinct before they'd all starve to death for want of it.
Maybe they could be fed a kangaroo, then killed while they weren't in hunting mode.
Humans happened to arrive right before mass extinctions all over the world and were strangely immune to all of the wild and wonderful extinction pressures that we can retcon to explain them. How clever of us.
If only we'd gotten so good at ignoring elephant sized things in close proximity a little sooner, we might have actually earned some of the blamelessness that would seem to be the goal of the behaviour.
These are of course all points that have been made in the literature, they have also been contested in the literature. A be happy to send you some reviews
@ If you have any compelling evidence that the carnivores large enough to predate on humans all happened to starve to death right after our arrival, despite the wealth of still extant prey species, I'm sure I'd be fascinated.
You'd think that if the early settlers were somehow averse to harming them, our arrival as an additional menu item would have been their salvation from the astronomically low odds that their lineage, which had survived for tens of millions of years, in a range of habitats, would become extinct within a few thousand years of that event.
The simple fact is that there is no 'proof' for either claim. But if you're not prepared to read the arguments from both sides that your business. Personally, my mind is open. Simple fact is we cannot tease out the relative significance of different factors in the extinctions that are happening today. This debate will continue for centuries I suspect. Quite possibly longer, and all on the basis of far less data than we have for current extinction processes.
Also when people are talking about the drop bear hypothesis they or meaning about dropping down onto large browsers to pounce on them
*I don't really push that theory anymore I think they use their leaping ability to pounce on ground prey
I don't totally discount the possibility that they sometimes dropped from the trees. But I am sure it wasn't there primary mode of attack.
@RealPaleontology I quit using that theory because I had studied the fauna of South Walker Creek and realized that the animals there could be killed without having to use tree dropping, since palorchestes was only the size of a bear or the giant kangaroos which have their Achilles heel in that tail
Also I apologize for my outright troll-like behavior on your previous video, I was immature
I still disagree with the terror bird video but here's a more mature criticism, allometry wasn't accounted for, andalgalornis is of a different niche and build than the largest Terror birds so it makes sense why the biomechanics would show why IT wasn't designed for big prey so really, the skull at the back is significantly less broad, skull is proportionately smaller, less reinforced, the crest that reinforces the skull is larger Terror birds is smaller in andalgalornis, it hook tip is proportionally less prominent.
Overall it was a poor lab rat for the larger Terror birds and if an opinion is to be formed the larger Terror birds must be used because the family is simply too diverse and too different in build amongst its members to use just one terror bird to make assumptions about the rest
Hey not problem Jackson, it feeds algorithm for me!
@RealPaleontology if you do make the video on the ordovician look up these for sources
"Eurypterids use tail to slash prey"
"Megalograptus basket"
"Endoceras incertae sedis"
"Endoceras buoyancy DJ peterman "
They should give you the information on Megalograptus and endoceras
Do you think this predator would stand up like a bear? Perhaps to get a better view or intimidate rivals. That tail would be very useful for that. I hope to visit Australia one day. Would absolutely love to see those fossils in person.
Yes I think it would have stood up using its tail foot balance a bit like a kangaroo
Maybe a lot of it's climbing adaptations were more for the babies. Perhaps it would stash it's young in trees while hunting. I imagine having a large Joey in the pouch would not be helpful when stalking prey. Could have been like a grizzly where the adults do very little climbing. Stashing food in trees like a leopard makes sense as well, altho after watching your megalania video I think thylocaleo probably ate the big lizard more often than the other way around.
I'm also curious if it is cooler on the ground or up in a tree in the Australian bush. The overpowered jaws of the marsupial lion would probably sheer right thru thick lizard and croc hides.
Once the young become too big to carry there almost certainly kept in a den. Certainly this is what other marsupial predators such as Quolls and Tasmanian devils do
2 questions
one how do you think thylacoleo using that bite? like to break the neck or sever the throat, im betting on severing the throat.
second has to do with the land croc quinkana, its an ignored animal. Im trying to determine the size of late pleistocene specimens (which are just teeth) now normally tooth based referall is questionable but they are ziphodont croc teeth identical to quinkana and quinkana is already known from the mid pleistocene and many taxa in australia lived through the early to late pleistocene so i dont see why quinkana couldnt.
anyway, the size of quinkana is kind of debated. possible pliocene remains suggest a 20 ft size but those are debated. the type species is q fortirostrum and its skull was 34 cm long and most estimates place it at around 3m long. there was a blog spot that scaled up the king creek tooth to teeth from the holotype. They scaled using a skull reconstruction of the holotype and then a depiction of the king creek specimen, the king creek tooth was at least 1 in long and in the blogspot the skull of the king creek tooth was about 50 cm, after being scaled from the holotype skulls corresponding tooth.
remember i said q fortirostrum had 34 cm skull and 3 m long body, which is skull to body length ratio of 1:8.8, by multiplying 50cm (the likely skull size of the king creek quinkana) by 8.8, my tentative estimate of the king creek quinkana is 4.4 meters long.
do you think all of this is scientifically sound? given how poor the record is
The marsupial liion would have used different bites and killing techniques depending on the prey. I will do an episode on so-called terrestrial crocodiles and I'll talk about the sizes there!
@@RealPaleontology whats your definition on land crocs
I havent seen the movie Carnifex, but some shortcuts that I saw absolutely..... sucks. The dentition is completely failed. What is more impresive on Thylacoleo is dentitional formula 1/1 and 1/1 or so it seems; if I didnt overlook some. Both killing and eating with 4 teeth.
Yeah haven't seen anything about the movie. It doesn't have many teeth but the ones that does have are way big!
Since this is your favourite animal and your knowledge of bones. You must have an idea of what you think it print or prints would look.
Interesting question. To be honest I've never thought about it. But I will now!
@RealPaleontology I took a pic of a print I found. Which had me combing internet searching for even a close match. 5 toed with retractable claws and the pad isn't like anything else. I had to take a few pics as I'd never seen anything like it. Could I send you pic ?
@@Richard-gy1pq sure, my email is stephenwroe931@gmail.com
@RealPaleontology Thank you.
If the only reason the thylacaleo climbed trees was to takes it kill out of reach of other predators, what were those other predators which it could not deal with pound for pound?
Probably Megalania and that terrestrial crocodile that I don’t remember the name of sorry about that I’m not good with names😞
It's biggest competitor would have been the giant monitor lizard which could certainly grow to half a ton in weight
@@HeavenlySunsetSkies Quinkana
@@RealPaleontology but Quinkana may also have been a serious competitor to Thylacoleo? Do you have any plans for making a video about Quinkana?
@appelbashir9841 I have my doubts about that. And yes I will cover this in another episode.
Oh I also wanted to say on the subject of bite force. It's very hard to get an animal to bite as hard as they can to read the bite force.A friend of mine had a kitten like a year old and he's a big guy ,long story short,that kitchen bite him in the index finger knuckle it's tooth was completely buried in his knuckle ,hence animals can bite harder than expected!as always great show
That's absolutely true. I make that point in my bite club episode. I think i you might like it
I don't think it would drag the whole prey I mean if it's need for thick vegetation to ambush was anything this thing was going after the big browsers of the day which was like big ass kangaroos there's no way it could drag them into trees
Instead it probably would have just cut off a body part like the leg or something and dragged that up into the tree
Yes leopards are know to do that.