Welcome to Thylacoleo Revealed - A Natural History of the Marsupial Lion, a compendium of information on the extinct marsupial family Thylacoleonidae. Thylacoleonids are predatory marsupials that lived in Australia from the Late Oligocene until the end of the Pleistocene. Members of this marsupial family varied in size from that of a squirrel to nearly as large as an African lion. The largest and most well known species of the family is Thylacoleo carnifex. Commonly referred to as the "marsupial lion", T. carnifex was a robustly built Ice Age animal with a broad skull and forward-facing binocular eyes. Among its most unusual features is its dentition, which includes enlarged incisors and shearing premolars. The first evidence for the existence of Thylacoleo came from fossil material collected in the early 1830s by Major Thomas Mitchell in the Wellington Valley region of New South Wales. The genus was first described by the famous British anatomist Richard Owen, in 1859. Click on any of the topic listings shown below to begin exploring the website. Clicking on a section's title image will take you to its introductory page. Cameron R. Campbell
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