Australian History: Bunyips
For thousands of years Aboriginals have told stories about fearsome booming monsters that lived in swamps. Today we call them bunyips. Scientists believe that the bunyip was really an ancient animal called the diprotodon which looked like a wombat but it grew to the size of a rhinoceros and weighed about 2 tonnes (about 2 cars). It was a plant-eater and because it was a marsupial, carried its young in a pouch. The first diprotodon bones were found in 1839 but it was not until 1893 that large numbers of bones were discovered in muddy areas and in places where lakes used to be. Diprotodons lived more than a million years ago. They died out about 20,000 years ago. This was well after Aboriginals came to Australia.