What are some of the endangered animals in Victoria?

Answer 1

The Mountain Pygmy-possum, or Burramys, is a mouse-sized, nocturnal marsupial that lives in boulder-strewn slopes of the Victorian and NSW alpine region, particularly in areas of treeless vegetation dominated by dense shrubs including the fleshy-fruited Mountain Plum-pine. It feeds on invertebrates fleshy fruit and seeds during the spring and summer months and hibernates during winter - the only Australian marsupial to do so. Burramys is classified as critically endangered in Victoria, endangered in Australia, it is listed under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act (FFG), and is classified as endangered in IUCN Red Book.

The first non-Aboriginal to see a Burramys was a 28 year old South African palaeontologist named Robert Broom and all he saw was a small collection of fossilised bones - six jaws and some skull fragments - that had been collected, in 1894, from the Wombeyan Caves, about 100 km south-west of Sydney. Although he wasn't an expert on marsupials (he would go on to become a world authority on early hominids) he knew enough to recognise that some of the teeth were unusually large with distinct serrations and ridges which were unlike those of other marsupials, and he wrote the first description of the new species the following year. In the absence of a full skeleton Broom thought that the fossil was of a small kangaroo and thus the name Burramys parvus(from 'burra' - thought to be one of the Aboriginal words for kangaroo : 'mys' - a mouse : parvus - small) was coined.

This discovery went virtually unrecognised for over 50 years until a Western Australian zoologist, David Ride, and a field naturalist from Victoria, Norman Wakefield, revived the interest. David Ride re-examined Broom's specimens, including some that Broom hadn't looked at, with more advanced techniques and then prepared a new description for Burramys which he now determined was a small possum. In 1960, Norm Wakefield, with the help of another Victorian zoologist, Bob Warneke, found bones of Burramys in a cave near Buchan, in eastern Victoria. These bones, although old, weren't fossils. Some were of animals that had been alive a few thousand years ago and others were much more recent, perhaps only a few hundred years old. For the first time it occurred to biologists that Burramys might still be living in Australia.