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Dig unearths tiny Australian carnivore

Australian scientists say they have unearthed the remains of a bizarre, prehistoric, carnivore in an ancient former rainforest, where specimens stretch back 25 million years.

Paleontologist Henk Godthelp of the University of New South Wales says it was the first time this particular 'marsupi-carnivore' had been seen in Australia, calling it an exciting and unique discovery.

"It may be that it's a type of bandicoot or a marsupial related to native cats," says Godthelp.

"It looks like it had a head a bit like a badger, but with fangs nearly as half as long as its skull.

"It's an animal we don't think we've seen before up at Riversleigh so it was quite a nice find for us."

Riversleigh, in north-western Queensland, was a prehistoric rainforest which is now a rich hunting ground for fossils and ancient remains, after creatures were trapped and fossilised in its lime-rich pools.

Carnivorous kangaroos, gigantic flightless birds and ancient platypus species are among the more unusual finds over the past 35 years, along with tree-dwelling crocodiles and primitive ancestors of the koala and wombat.

Many of its thousands of species have "never been seen anywhere else in Australia let alone the world," says Godthelp, adding that the skull of the newly found carnivore was small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

Many unknowns

Godthelp says most of the specimen is still encased in rock, and therefore it's too early to make any assumptions about the ancient animal or its behaviour.

Scientists will now use acid to dissolve the rock that contains the skull, in the hope of finding the remains of its body.

"It's going to take perhaps take two or three weeks before we start to see the major parts of the skull emerge, and by that stage we'll have a far better idea of what's going on."

"As we're extracting the bones from the rock, we harden them up to make sure they're preserved properly," he says.

Godthelp doesn't believe the carnivore has much in common with the sabre-tooth tiger that once existed in the northern hemisphere.

"It wasn't a voracious carnivore leaping around chewing the heads off things or anything of that nature," he says.

The World Heritage site at Riversleigh has one of the globe's richest mammal deposits from the Oligo-Miocene era, between 15 and 25 million years ago.

There are deposits from about 200 separate pools spread over an 80-square-kilometre area.