Those who venture into Foul Air Cave, below Buchan township in eastern Victoria, Australia, quickly realize how it got its ominous name. In its deepest chambers, bacteria consume oxygen and excrete organic gases to produce a toxic stench.
The cave is also a natural pitfall trap. Its water-worn entrance offers no escape to any creature unlucky enough to tumble in. The smell of death clings to your nostrils as you navigate vertiginous drops and calf-deep, sucking mud.
Tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago, during the Pleistocene Epoch, Foul Air Cave accumulated the remains of diverse, often giant mammals known collectively as Australia’s megafauna.
One of these mammals was the giant echidna Megalibgwilia owenii, as we report in a new paper published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Paleontology. We recognized this extinct monotreme, twice the size of Australian echidnas today, from a newly identified fossil collected almost 120 years ago.
And the specimen is enough to verify for the first time that this species once roamed Ice Age Victoria, spanning a 1,000-kilometer gap in its previously known distribution.
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