Was This Marsupial A Lion: Or A Pouch-Robbing, Meat-Browsing, Cookie-Cutting Koala?

Robin and the Honey Badger’s mission is to recharge biology with originality for you, the non-specialist reader. Exploring the Bio-edge is a series of e-essays presenting lateral thoughts in search of ever more interesting stories from biology. In this e-essay: in our determination to see a pouched felid, have we overlooked an even more gripping dentition? The very name of the marsupial lion – the largest-ever mammalian meat-eater of Australia – seems biased by an assumption that some extinct marsupial must have been a counterpart to sabre-tooth cats. But any such bias buries the most interesting fact about this fossil species: namely that a plant-eating ancestor was recruited to meat-eating. Join us as we turn the conventional interpretation of this most dramatic member of the marsupial fauna on its head – and particularly on its canine teeth.

Each morning Robin and the Honey Badger wake up to a world of Nature with new curiosity. Which aspects of the natural world have been underlooked? Which adaptations or non-adaptations of organisms have been downplayed because of some theoretical bias? Which observations have yet to be integrated because of interdisciplinary timidity? How laterally can we think as we cruise the bewildering diversity of life forms on Earth? Join us in our mission of Exploring the Bio-edge in a series of e-essays that fearlessly - but accurately - cover all corners of biology.