00:00A decade ago, an outback station worker stumbled across something unusual.
00:06I thought they'd found a dinosaur, just because there was these big bones that were petrified.
00:12Sticking out of the red soil, a rare fossil of a giant wombat-like marsupial that roamed
00:18Australia thousands of years ago, a now extinct diprotodon.
00:23Excavated and taken to the museum.
00:26We don't know what it was doing there.
00:28It was just a one-off specimen that's been found.
00:30This particular fossil, fondly known as Shirley, is being prepared for exhibition.
00:36So as well as being the most northerly diprotodon found in Australia, it is one of the oldest
00:42ones.
00:43We collected a series of sediment samples from beneath the fossil, from at the same
00:49level as the fossil, and then above the fossil, and using OSL dating, Optically Stimulated
00:55Luminescence Dating, we were able to say when that sediment was last exposed to daylight.
01:00The specialist found Shirley is between 112,000 and 123,000 years old.
01:07That dating has allowed us to now start looking into what was happening in northern Australia
01:14in regard to diprotodons.
01:15We were interested in its age because it's very far north for a diprotodon discovery.
01:21Related to Australia's modern-day wombats, diprotodons were the largest marsupial to
01:26ever live.
01:27It was about the size of a white rhinoceros, but without the horns.
01:31So it was large, four-footed, slow-moving, and it was a plant-eater.
01:37Shirley's now under the microscope again.
01:40We are now using handheld tools to carefully clean off all the adherent clay and rock that
01:49is sticking to the skeleton, so to make it nice and clean and ready for display.
01:54A complex process that could take longer than a year before she's ready for display.
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