''Nototherium'', from

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...

νότος (''nótos''), meaning "south", and θηρίον (''theríon''), meaning "beast", is an

extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...

genus Genus (; : genera ) is a taxonomic rank above species and below family (taxonomy), family as used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In bino ...

of diprotodontid

marsupial Marsupials are a diverse group of mammals belonging to the infraclass Marsupialia. They are natively found in Australasia, Wallacea, and the Americas. One of marsupials' unique features is their reproductive strategy: the young are born in a r ...

from

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

and

New Guinea New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; , fossilized , also known as Papua or historically ) is the List of islands by area, world's second-largest island, with an area of . Located in Melanesia in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is ...

. This marsupial had hypsodont molars and weighed around 500 kg.Ross D.E. MacPhee, Hans-Dieter Sues, 1999, Extinctions in Near Time, p.251, Springer Science & Business Media It was a relative of the larger '' Diprotodon'' and a distant kin to modern wombats.

Species

* ''Nototherium inerme'' Owen, 1845 * ''Nototherium watutense'' Anderson, 1937 (formerly considered to be a member of '' Kolopsis'') Plio-Pleistocene, New Guinea. * ''Nototherium mitchelli'' Owen, 1845 Pleistocene, Australia (possibly a junior synonym of ''N. inerme'')

References

* ''Wildlife of Gondwana: Dinosaurs and Other Vertebrates from the Ancient Supercontinent (Life of the Past)'' by Pat Vickers Rich, Thomas Hewitt Rich, Francesco Coffa, and Steven Morton * ''Prehistoric Mammals of Australia and New Guinea: One Hundred Million Years of Evolution'' by John A. Long, Michael Archer, Timothy Flannery, and Suzanne Hand Pleistocene marsupials Pliocene marsupials Diprotodontids Prehistoric mammals of Australia Prehistoric marsupial genera Fossil taxa described in 1845 Taxa named by Richard Owen {{paleo-marsupial-stub