Australia’s carnivorous marsupials, particularly the dasyurids that include well-known predators such as the Tasmanian devil and quolls, are shown by new fossil evidence to have older and more complex origins than previously documented. Research reported by The Conversation and Phys.org centers on a small number of tiny fossil jaws. The jaws help fill a gap in the evolutionary record and indicate that the diversification of dasyurids—regarded as some of Australia’s most successful predatory marsupials—began millions of years earlier than the earlier fossil record could confirm.
Both sources frame dasyurids as a broad family within marsupials, where the large, modern species are only part of the group’s diversity. The findings rely on the morphology of fossil jaw material to infer evolutionary relationships and timing, using the fossils to constrain how and when different dasyurid lineages emerged. Overall, the reporting emphasizes that the newly described fossils provide missing context for the deep evolutionary history of these predator species in Australia, while focusing on the significance of previously underrepresented early fossils.
