Diprotodontidae, from Ancient Greek δί- (dí-), meaning "two", πρῶτος (prôtos), meaning "first", and ὀδούς (odoús), meaning "tooth", is an extinct family of large herbivorous marsupials, endemic to Australia and New Guinea during the Oligocene through Pleistocene periods from 28.4 million to 40,000 years ago.
Diprotodontidae, from Ancient Greek δί- (dí-), meaning "two", πρῶτος (prôtos), meaning "first", and ὀδούς (odoús), meaning "tooth", is an extinct family of large herbivorous marsupials, endemic to Australia and New Guinea during the Oligocene through Pleistocene periods from 28.4 million to 40,000 years ago.
== Description == The family primarily consisted of large quadrupedal terrestrial browsers, notably including the largest marsupial that ever lived, the rhino-sized Diprotodon. Nimbadon, which is often considered a basal diprotodontid, was arboreal. Diprotodontids were plantigrade (foot and toes flat relative to the ground). In most diprotodontids, the forelimbs were not specialised and were capable of being used for functions other than movement. Some later diprotodontids from the Pliocene onwards like Ambulator and Diprotodon developed elephant-like forelimbs specialised for walking with modified wristbones which functioned as a heel, along with the development of footpads, which means that the digits probably did not contact the ground, as evidenced by the lack of toes on footprints of Diprotodon. In at least some representatives of the clade, the inside of the skull was lightened by large interior sinus spaces.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).