Crescent nail-tail wallaby
Crescent nail-tail wallaby[1] | |
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Illustration of male with female in background (Gould; Richter, 1863) | |
Scientific classification | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Mammalia |
Infraclass: | Marsupialia |
Order: | Diprotodontia |
Family: | Macropodidae |
Genus: | Onychogalea |
Species: | †O. lunata
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Binomial name | |
†Onychogalea lunata |
The crescent nail-tail wallaby, also known as the worong (Onychogalea lunata), was a small species of marsupial that grazed on grasses in the scrub and woodlands of southwestern and central
The species was extremely timid and would flee to a hollow log if disturbed at their daytime resting places, a small patch of sand cleared near a large shrub or tree. They ran with their short forelimbs awkwardly held toward the chest.
Taxonomy
The first description and specimens of the animal were presented by John Gould to the Linnean Society of London in 1840 and published in its Proceedings in 1841, assigning the new species to the genus Macropus and the epithet derived from the Latin lunatus, meaning "of the moon", for its crescent-shaped marks.[3]
When Gould completed his second volume of
Gould provided a common name for the species, lunated nail-tailed kangaroo, and cites
Description
A species of
Oldfield Thomas gave a diagnosis of the three species, distinguishing their superficial characters and tabulating a close comparison of their cranial measurements. This species was regarded by Thomas as more closely allied to
The species was hunted for food by the English settlers of southwest Australia, who described the flesh as white, resembling chicken and having a flavour similar to rabbit.[6]
Behaviour
The habits of O. lunata are poorly known,
"[t]he Waurong is found in the gum forests [eucalypt woodlands] of the interior of Western Australia, where there are patches of thick scrub and dense thickets, in the open glades intervening between which it is occasionally seen sunning itself, but at the slightest alarm immediately betakes itself to the shelter of the thick scrub; the dogs sometimes succeed in driving it out to the open spots, when, like the Kangaroo rats, it runs to the nearest hollow log, and is then easily captured. I remarked, that when sitting quietly cleaning itself, there was a constant twitching of the tail in an upward direction; an action which I have never seen performed by any other Kangaroo. I was not sufficiently near to ascertain whether this motion of the tail had any connection with the claw or nail at its extremity, but I think it not improbable. The Waurong makes no nest, but forms a hollow in the soft ground beneath a thick brush in which it lies during the heat of the day."[4]
Further observations of the animal were provided by Bruce Leake, a settler at
Distribution and habitat
A species with a wide distribution at the time of colonisation, it then contracted from the coast and is now presumably extinct. The
The habitat of the species was in a variety of vegetation types, although commonly associated with low scrub or thickets that were very dense. A common tree of the local environment was sheoak, Allocasuarina species, or the stinkwood Jacksonia furcellata.
Their abode is comparable to a European hare, a simple clearing or "squat", and they resided in areas so densely vegetated that they were often unnoticed and unobtainable by hunters. While the species was found in denser habitat than the tammar
The species was regarded as common, if not abundant, until its rapid decline. At the beginning of the 20th century
Shortridge's second field report on 18 specimens from "Woyaline, east of Pinjelly", published by Oldfield Thomas in 1907, was to be amongst the last descriptions of the declining population:
"More local than
Bettongia penicillata) in some of its habits, often running into hollow logs when disturbed. "Native name, 'Wurrine' or 'Wurrung.'" – Shortridge, G. C. in Thomas, O. (1907).[13]
A collection made at Alice Springs on the
Localised extinctions appear to have preceded the arrival of cats and foxes to some regions, often regarded as major threatening factors in the collapse of mammalian fauna in Australia. When this catastrophic decline of small to medium-sized mammals, termed as those in the "critical weight range", is modeled as a hypothesised epizootic event, they are one of a group of species estimated to have weak immunity to the disease and succumbed to it either directly or by increased vulnerability to predators, however, they are not a species mentioned as directly affected in the anecdotal reports of a fatal disease.[17] A news report of this and other small mammal species sudden disappearance at a road connecting Esperance and the Fraser Range, constructed in 1875, is consistent with modeling of the primary factor in the populations demise as disease. The epizootic theory includes secondary and tertiary causes for the extinction of the worong, the clearing for pastoralism that has also been proposed as the primary factor, and the remnants of the population being finally extirpated by hunting.[6]
Unrecorded since the last reliable sighting during the 1940s, the species is listed by the IUCN as presumed extinct. The conservation status was first assessed in 1965 as unknown, and in subsequent editions of the IUCN Red List as extinct.[2] The species appears in palaeontological records dated to the Pleistocene and Holocene, found in local fauna of fossil sites from New South Wales to Western Australia.[18]
This wallaby remained common, even in agricultural districts in the southwest of Western Australia, until about 1900. It had begun a steep decline by 1908, when the last wallaby was caught in the area. The last specimen of this wallaby to be collected alive was caught in a dingo trap on the Nullarbor Plain in 1927 or 1928. W.A. Mills sent it to Taronga Zoo in Sydney and the animal ended up in the Australian Museum. The species survived in the more arid parts of its distribution until the 1950s, and it is thought that it became extinct at about 1956, probably because of the spread of the red fox.[citation needed]
References
- OCLC 62265494.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Burbidge, A.A. & Woinarski, J. 2016. Onychogalea lunata. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T15331A21957917. Downloaded on 04 July 2019.
- ^ a b Gould, J. (1841). "On five new species of kangaroo". Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. 1840: 92–94.
- ^ a b c Gould, John (1863). The mammals of Australia. Vol. 2. Printed by Taylor and Francis, pub. by the author. pp. pl.55 et seq.
- ^ a b Thomas, O. (1888). Catalogue of the Marsupialia and Monotremata in the collection of the British Museum (Natural History). London: Printed by order of the Trustees. pp. 75, 77–78.
- ^ a b c d e f g Abbott, I. (2008). "Historical perspectives of the ecology of some conspicuous vertebrate species in south-west Western Australia" (PDF). Conservation Science W. Aust. 6 (3): 42–48.
- ^ .
- ^ a b Finlayson, H.H. (1961). "On central Australian mammals. Part IV-The distribution and status of central Australian species". Records of the South Australian Museum. 14: 141–191 [166].
- ^ Abbott, Ian (2001). "Aboriginal names of mammal species in south-west Western Australia". CALMScience. 3 (4): 472–473.
- ^ ISBN 9780195573954.
- ISBN 0207153256.
- ^ Thomas, O. (1906). "On mammals collected in south-west Australia for Mr. W.E. Balston". Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. 1906: 468–478.
- ^ a b Thomas, O. (1907). "List of further collections of mammals from Western Australia, including a series from Bernier Island, obtained for Mr. W.E. Balston; with field-notes by the collector, Mr. G.C. Shortridge". Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. 1906: 763–777.
- ISBN 0207144540.
- doi:10.1071/MU903217.
- Zietz, A. (1892). "Vertebrata". Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia. 16: 154–177 [155].
- ISSN 0067-2238.
- Turnbull, W.D. (1989). The mammalian fauna of Madura Cave, Western Australia. Field Museum of Natural History.
- A Gap in Nature by Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten (2001), published by William Heinemann
- ISBN 978-0-06-055804-8.
- ^ Leake, B. 1962. Eastern wheatbelt wildlife. Leake, B., Perth. in Burbidge, Red List (2008, op. cit.).