Litokoala is an extinct genus of marsupials, and along with Nimiokoala, is closely related to the modern koala. The three genera may have diverged at an earlier date, although the drying of the continent and the expansion of Eucalyptus forests towards the late Miocene may have delayed the evolution of cranial features unique to the modern genera. This indicates that either fossil genus could be an ancestor of the modern genus, or the modern genus has a common ancestor to both. More material needs collection to improve their taxonomical relationships.
Litokoala is an extinct genus of marsupials, and along with Nimiokoala, is closely related to the modern koala. The three genera may have diverged at an earlier date, although the drying of the continent and the expansion of Eucalyptus forests towards the late Miocene may have delayed the evolution of cranial features unique to the modern genera. This indicates that either fossil genus could be an ancestor of the modern genus, or the modern genus has a common ancestor to both. More material needs collection to improve their taxonomical relationships.
The genus lived around 16–10 million years ago in the middle Miocene Riversleigh of Queensland. This area is described as a rainforest habitat at time of sediment deposition. It had a different diet to the modern species, with the dental symphysis unfused, indicating a diet that was properly varied in nature, unlike the specialised nature of Phascolarctos. The size is estimated to be only half of the modern genus. Cranial adaptations are intermediate between the extant common brushtail possum and koala, with minor divergence from either.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).