Giant echidnas weighing 15kg roamed Victoria – and the evidence was hiding in plain sight

A skull fragment found in a tray of unsorted fossils collected more than a century ago leads to discovery Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast A prehistoric fossil, hiding in plain sight in museum storage for more than a century, has revealed that giant echidnas once roamed Victoria. The Owen’s giant echidna, Megalibgwilia owenii, lived during the Pleistocene, a geological epoch that began 2.5m years ago. It grew to about 1 metre long and weighed up to 15kg – about twice the size of Australia’s modern echidnas. Specimens of the extinct monotreme have previously been found across Australia, from Western Australia to Tasmania – but they had been mysteriously absent from the fossil record in Victoria. That changed when Tim Ziegler, the collection manager of vertebrate palaeontology at the Museums Victoria Research Institute, came across a skull fragment in “a tray of unsorted fossils” that had been excavated in 1907 from Foul Air Cave, in the Buchan cave complex in East Gippsland. “I remember plucking out this one bone fragment, which isn’t much longer than your finger,” Ziegler said. “It