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A skull of a giant echidna was kept for 119 years in an Australian museum without anyone knowing what it was — until a researcher decided to look closely and discovered an animal three times larger than current ones, filling a thousand-kilometer gap in the history of megafauna
In 1907, explorers removed a fragmented skull from a cave called Foul Air Cave — in the East Gippsland region, in the state of Victoria, Australia.
The fossil was taken to the Museums Victoria collection, cataloged, and forgotten in a drawer for over a century.
No one imagined that skull belonged to a giant echidna — a close relative of the platypus that lived during the Pleistocene and weighed as much as a four-year-old child.
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According to researchers from the Museums Victoria Research Institute, the identification was only made in 2021 by Tim Ziegler, who realized the specimen’s importance by comparing it with fossils from other regions of Australia.
The study was published in the scientific journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.
The giant echidna was 1 meter long and weighed 16 kilograms — three times more than current ones
The identified species is Megalibgwilia owenii, known as Owen’s giant echidna.
This animal measured up to 1 meter in length and weighed between 15 and 16 kilograms.
To get an idea of the scale, the short-beaked echidna that lives in Australia today measures about half a meter and weighs between 5 and 7 kilograms.
In other words, the prehistoric version was three times heavier than the current one and almost twice its size.
Compared to the platypus — another Australian monotreme —, the giant echidna was even more impressive: the platypus rarely exceeds 3 kilograms.
The giant echidna, therefore, was the largest terrestrial monotreme of its time.
Why it was a 120-year mystery: a thousand-kilometer piece was missing
Before this rediscovery, giant echidna fossils had only been found in Tasmania and New South Wales.
Between these two points there is a distance of approximately a thousand kilometers — and no record of the species in Victoria.
This was considered strange by paleontologists.
Victoria had all the ideal environmental conditions to host the animal during the glacial period.
The absence of evidence created what scientists call a biogeographical gap.
Without the Victoria fossil, it was not possible to confirm that the giant echidna was continuously distributed across southeastern Australia.
The identification of the Foul Air Cave skull filled exactly this thousand-kilometer gap.
Now scientists can state that the species migrated along the entire coastal strip of southeastern Australia during the Pleistocene.
How a fossil was forgotten for 119 years inside a museum
Natural history museums house millions of specimens in their collections.
Many of them are collected in field expeditions and cataloged generically, without in-depth analysis.
That’s exactly what happened with the Foul Air Cave skull.
Collected in 1907, it was stored at Museums Victoria as a common fossil.
Only in 2021, more than a century later, researcher Tim Ziegler decided to revisit old museum collections.
By examining the skull and comparing it with scientific materials from other museums in Australia, Ziegler realized it was a giant echidna.
The identification was made by studying the anatomy of the remaining skull and comparing it with specimens from public museums across Australia.
After that, Ziegler and Jeremy Lockett‘s team revisited the original cave to contextualize the finding.
Echidnas and platypuses: the last monotremes on the planet
The echidna belongs to the group of monotremes — mammals that lay eggs.
Today, the only living monotremes are echidnas and the platypus, all exclusive to Australia and New Guinea.
This group is considered one of the oldest among mammals.
In the Pleistocene, however, diversity was much greater.
There were sheep-sized echidnas, giant platypuses, and other monotremes that did not survive climate change.
The discovery of the giant echidna in Victoria reinforces that monotreme megafauna was more widespread than previously thought.
The Australian Pleistocene: a world of giants
The Pleistocene was the geological epoch that lasted from 2.6 million to about 11 thousand years ago.
In Australia, this period became famous for its megafauna: large animals that disappeared.
Among them were 3-meter-tall kangaroos, car-sized wombats, and 5-meter-long predatory lizards.
The giant echidna was part of this cast of enormous animals that dominated the continent.
Most disappeared between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, likely due to a combination of climate change and the arrival of the first humans in Australia.
When the discovery is inside the museum, not in the field
This story illustrates an increasingly common phenomenon in modern paleontology.
Many of the great recent discoveries do not come from excavations in remote places.
They come from reviewing old collections with fresh eyes and updated technology.
The giant echidna skull had been available for study since 1907.
It just took someone with the right knowledge to ask the right question.
It is estimated that natural history museums around the world house millions of specimens not yet formally described.
Each drawer may contain the next great revelation about Earth’s past.
What still needs to be clarified
Despite the importance of the rediscovery, the study has limitations.
The skull is fragmented, which makes definitive taxonomic classification difficult.
There is debate among experts about whether the specimen belongs to the subspecies Megalibgwilia owenii or Megalibgwilia robusta.
Furthermore, as the fossil was collected over a century ago, information about the original geological context is limited.
Researchers revisited the cave, but the site conditions have changed over 119 years.
Still, the identification is considered robust enough to confirm the presence of the giant echidna in Victoria for the first time.
New expeditions to the East Gippsland region may reveal additional fossils that help complete the puzzle.
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