Museum Victoria's head of science John Long will also this week present findings from expeditions into a cave in Australia's remote Nullarbor Plain that yielded a fossil treasure trove, including the only complete marsupial lion skeleton ever found.
"It was a once-in-a-lifetime fossil," Long said. "For the first time we could see the complete limbs and feet, revealing an opposable thumb with a huge retractable claw which was used to disembowel prey.
"It was like the velociraptor of the mammal world."
The marsupial lion became extinct about 50,000 years ago, along with the rest of Australia's so-called "mega-fauna" — the giant versions of harmless modern Australian animals such as wombats, kangaroos and koala bears.
The Nullarbor caves contained some 60 mega-fauna skeletons, including 10 marsupial lions and a new special of marsupial nicknamed the "devil wallaby" because of the horn-like protrusions on its head.
Scientists had long wondered whether the appearance of humans in Australia 45,000 years ago led to the extinction of the continent's mega-fauna.
However, this month a team from the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University released a study arguing that climate change killed the giant beasts up to 10,000 years before man arrived.
