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Locals in Oshawa, Ont., have been left searching for answers and marsupials after a kangaroo appeared to have been spotted in the city. A local pet search group shared a video on Friday morning, suggesting a Kangaroo had been seen on Winchester Road in Oshawa just before 8 a.m. The video posted by pet group, Team Chelsea, was one of several apparent sightings of the Australian animal. Another video submitted by a viewer to Global News shows what appears to be a kangaroo standing at the end of a driveway. The five-second video is shot from a passenger side window....

A remarkable incident unfolded in southern Australia when a farmer, Frank Pao-Ling Tsai, stumbled upon a creature believed to be locally extinct for over a century. Tsai, a dedicated trout farmer residing in Beachport, South Australia, was jolted awake by a commotion emanating from his chicken coop in the early morning of Tuesday, September 26. Intrigued and concerned, he swiftly ventured outside to investigate the source of the disturbance. To his astonishment, Tsai discovered a peculiar spotted creature amidst the chaos, accompanied by the unfortunate demise of one of his chickens. Initially perplexed by the unfamiliar sight, Tsai recounted his...

Long ago, almost up until the end of the last ice age, a peculiar giant kangaroo roamed the mountainous rainforests of New Guinea.Now, research published by myself and colleagues suggests this kangaroo was not closely related to modern Australian kangaroos. Rather, it represents a previously unknown type of primitive kangaroo unique to New Guinea.Australia used to be home to all manner of giant animals called megafauna, until most of them went extinct about 40,000 years ago. These megafauna lived alongside animals we now consider characteristic of the Australian bush – kangaroos, koalas, crocodiles and the like – but many were...

Humans and kangaroos are close cousins on the evolutionary tree sharing a common ancestor 150 million years ago, according to Australian researchers. Scientists have mapped the genetic code of the Australian marsupials for the first time and found large chunks of DNA are the same. 'There are a few differences, we have a few more of this, a few less of that, but they are the same genes and a lot of them are in the same order,'  said Jenny Graves, director of the Centre of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics. 'We thought they'd be completely scrambled, but they're not....

Nearly 90 years after the last thylacine died, a group of scientists at the University of Melbourne, Australia, are attempting to bring the extinct marsupial back to life Thylacines, also known as Tasmanian tigers (despite being a marsupial and looking nothing like a tiger apart from their stripy back), are thought to have gone extinct back in 1936, when Benjamin – the last confirmed member of the species – died in captivity at Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo. Reports of thylacine sightings in the wild continued long after Benjamin died, with many people hopeful that they might still be alive out there...

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, is one of Australia's most iconic species. Even though it has been extinct since 1936, the slender, striped marsupial maintains its place in Australian mythology because of a constant string of supposed sightings that has captivated the public and the media. Just last year, one group claimed to have spotted the "Tassie tiger" padding through Australia's forests. The claims were never verified. Sadly, the Tasmanian tiger is gone -- but with advances in biotechnology, that might not have to be the case. A group of researchers from the University of Melbourne plan to bring the...

Archaeologist Jinu Koshy has found thousands of rock drawings in Andhra Pradesh – including some of marsupials. How did it land there? And why? An upright standing creature that archaeologist Jinu Koshy believes to be a marsupial. | Anupama Chandrasekaran The landscape was a geological crumb cake – a ruddy tableland bristling with boulders, rocks and pebbles. Every step that archaeologist Jinu Koshy took was like a shuffle dance.A short while into the trek, echoes of bleating goats boomeranged, signalling an approaching ravine. Koshy stood at the nibbled edge of the chasm, looking for rock shelters.It was the 42-year-old archaeologist’s...

The crest-tailed mulgara was once widely distributed across sandy deserts in inland Australia. Credit: Reece Pedler ===================================================================================== A crest-tailed mulgara, a small carnivorous marsupial known only from fossilised bone fragments and presumed extinct in NSW for more than century, has been discovered in Sturt National Park north-west of Tibooburra. A team from the UNSW Sydney's Wild Deserts project made the unexpected discovery during recent scientific monitoring. UNSW scientist and wild deserts ecologist Dr Rebecca West says it is particularly exciting to find a crest-tailed mulgara alive for the first time in NSW. "The crest-tailed mulgara was once widely distributed...

SYDNEY (AFP) - Scientists in Australia announced Friday they had found the jawbone of a giant wombat the size of a large car that lived 20,000-40,000 years ago. The jawbone of the ancient marsupial, part of the "mega-fauna" that once roamed pre-historic Australia, was found by a tour guide at the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. The animal, named the diprotodon, was two metres (6.5 feet) tall and three metres (10 feet) long, weighing about three tonnes. By comparison, modern wombats are about one metre (three feet) long, 25 centimetres (10 inches) high and weigh 20-45...

(12-22) 19:23 PST ENGLEWOOD, Pa. (AP) -- Mary Kathleen O'Connor, 16, doing some studying for school about 6 a.m. Tuesday, said she was the first to be startled by an apparent Christmas tree stowaway. "I'm looking at the tree and the angel just pops off," she said. "And a second later, this head just popped up. The eyes were, like, glowing. I was thinking, 'Oh my God!' And I screamed." Other family members came running. "We looked at it and I thought it might have been a fake," said her father, Michael O'Connor, a Frackville attorney. "But then it moved...

Ice Age Marsupial Topped Three Tons, Scientists Say John Pickrell in England for National Geographic News October 17, 2003 A giant, wombat-like marsupial that roamed Ice Age Australia, may have been much bigger than experts previously believed. The beast, known as Diprotodon optatum, may have been larger than all but the biggest hippopotamus or rhinoceros, according to the first rigorous experimental estimate of its bulk by scientists in Sydney, Australia. Experts now believe that Diprotodon weighed in at a whopping 6,142 pounds (2,786 kilograms), or nearly 32 times as heavy as the largest marsupial alive today, the red kangaroo (Macropus...