Hey, I'm Flor Lichtenen and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the show, wombats the size of hippos, 10-foot-tall kangaroos, and a new technique to identify mysterious biological samples.

In museums and universities over the world, there are so many of these bags of bone scraps that no one

really has looked at since. So there's still a lot of work to do. If you think about Australia,

one thing that probably comes to mind are the animals that live there, from koalas to kangaroos to a surprisingly large

selection of creatures that can kill you. But once upon a time, the Australian landscape had

some even weirder fauna, like a marsupial with immense claws and a small trunk, or a slow-moving

kangaroo-like creature that walked on all fours,

a wombat, the size of a hippo.

They're all extinct now, and researchers are trying to figure out why.

Writing this week in the journal Frontiers in Mammal Science, researchers describe one tool they're using to hunt for clues.

It's called ZooMS, and it uses samples of ancient

protein, not DNA, to identify what animal a bone came from. Joining me now to talk about it is Dr. Carly

Peters. She worked on this project at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Yena, Germany,

and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the

Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and the Evolution of Human Behavior at the University

of Algarve in Ferru, Portugal. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me. It's

great to talk to you more about what we've been doing. Well, you had me at Giant Wombats,

obviously. Tell me a little bit about them.

So basically, the animals that we studied are all extinct now. And they're all giant versions of

what you could still find in Australia today. So you would have the giant wombat for a giant

kangaroo. And you also have creatures that don't really have anything

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