A scientific expedition can take researchers on some unlikely paths and discoveries.
Take last year’s trip to the Nullabor Plain by a team led by Western Australian Museum Curator of Mammalogy, Dr Kenny Travouillon. As the team was driving through the wide open spaces of the Nullabor to check on fossil specimens, they spotted something on top of an underground wombat warren that wasn’t just dirt. It turned out to be two near-complete Southern Hairy-nosed Wombat skeletons.
Dr Travouillon described their chance discovery as “exciting for Western Australia and good news for the marsupial” as wombats had been feared to be extinct in the State.
“Wombats in Western Australia were almost completely extinct as a result of the introduction of European Rabbits,” he said.
“The rapid explosion of rabbit populations, the competition for food and burrows, and the introduction of disease such as mange drastically affected wombat populations.
“The last major survey on the Nullarbor Plain in the 1980s found almost no evidence of them being present in Western Australia, fearing their extinction.”
Dr Travouillon said while wombat populations continued to survive in South Australia, the Western Australian populations diminished.
“Many people are not aware that wombats live in Western Australia or how endangered they are. We now have two Southern Hairy-nosed Wombat skeletons in the State Collection which means we can research and compare data between States and monitor populations in the future,” he said.
In addition to collecting the skeletons, the field team also recorded numerous active warrens.
The fieldwork was funded by the Foundation for the WA Museum through support received from the Minderoo Foundation. It aimed to collect and compare specimens from the Nullarbor, updating the mammal fossils and inland snail specimens which were last collected between the 1960s to early 2000s. In addition to collecting Southern Hairy-nosed Wombat skeletons, the team also found skeletons of extinct species of Pig-footed Bandicoot, Nullarbor Barred Bandicoot and both fossil and living native land snails.
WA Museum Technical Officers Corey Whisson, from Aquatic Zoology (molluscs), and Helen Ryan, from Earth and Planetary Sciences, collected several species of fossil and extant Bothriembryon. Although the species of this genus has not been confirmed, Bothriembryon have similar characteristics to those of the Bothriembryon praecursor, a Miocene species from 23 – 5 million years ago.
This included two new living species, and a significant find of a complete fossil ontogenetic series (from juvenile through to adult). These fossil specimens will be used to determine whether those collected in the 1960s are from an existing species or a new one.
