MONSTER kangaroos, car-sized wombats and flesh-eating marsupials were not the only outsized megafauna thundering across Australia before man’s arrival. Australian researchers say they have pieced together fossils of a giant goose that could have weighed up to half a tonne and may have thrived as long as 55 million years ago. Today’s Magpie goose and the South American Screamer are possibly the closest relatives of the hulking flightless birds. Palaeontologists remain divided as to whether the giant geese were herbivores or whether they hunted and ate meat.

　　(SD-Agencies)