A carnivore prowls the Australian Outback! Thylacoleo carnifex (‘meat-cutting pouched lion’) was the largest carnivorous marsupial to have ever lived. They stalked the plains and caves of Australia during the Pleistocene era (2.59 million to 11,784 years ago), and may have feasted on giant marsupials like Diprotodon and Zygomaturus.
This 3D skeletal reconstruction was created by Jac O’Connor in Blender (v3.4) through the articulation, repairing, rigging, and posing of models based on surface scans of T. carnifex that are publically available on Morphosource at the Virtual Australian Museum of Palaeontology (VAMP).
The vast majority of this model was based on scans taken by Jacob van Zoelen of specimen WAM 02.7.2. Other cranial specimens were used to reconstruct broken morphology (WAM 02.7.6 & from Owen 1859) and a novel morphing method was used to recreate missing axial elements.
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