A HABITAT FOR THE ENIGMATIC WYNYARDIA-BASSIANA SPENCER, 1901, AUSTRALIA FIRST DESCRIBED TERTIARY LAND MAMMAL

The habitat and habit of Australia's first recorded Tertiary marsupial species, Wynyardia bassiana, found some 130 years ago at Wynyard on t he northwestern coast of Tasmania, remain enigmatic (Aplin 1987, Aplin & Rich 1990). Fossil pollen and spores preserved in a rafted clast of estuarine silts from the same sequence of earliest Miocene marine san dstones as the skeletal remains indicate the local vegetation was Noth ofagus-gymnosperm evergreen rainforest, probably with a cryptogam-rich rather than woody subcanopy stratum. Comparisons with present-day Not hofagus rainforests suggest that, although the subcanopy would have be en sufficiently open to allow the passage of a large ground-dwelling h erbivorous marsupial, limited food resources are more consistent with Wymyardia being a generalist arboreal herbivore.