Australia is a kind of wonderland, second only to Africa for me, in terms of its pedigree of exotic badass-ness. It’s STILL a veritable Garden of Eden of the wild and exotic, but in times past it was way more so. There was a giant monitor lizard called a Megalania, which reached lengths of over twenty feet, a dragon in every sense of the word except for the fire-breathing thing. It went extinct about fifty thousand years ago. Considering the first humans arrived in Australia around sixty thousand years ago, that leaves ten THOUSAND years of interaction twixt man and beast. Still think humans and dinosaurs never coexisted? Don’t tell that to the Aborigines!
Aussie scientists discovered giant rat fossils not in their home country but in East Timor. How giant is “giant?” AS BIG AS A FREAKIN’ DOG—a real-life ROUS! For the two or three people out there who’ve never seen THE PRINCESS BRIDE, an ROUS is a “Rodent Of Unusual Size.” And they’re about as scary as you’d expect them to be. I mean, c’mon, they’re GIANT RATS. And get this: unlike the Megalania, the ROUS’s only went extinct about a thousand years ago! That’s right, there were giant rats walking the earth at the time of Charlemagne. Ponder that one for awhile, peeps. Giant freakin’ RATS!
