It was a 40 year animal mystery which followed perhaps thousands of years of silence.
The bony puzzle was solved after experienced cavers crawled for hours through a maze of fissures and tunnels, squeezing around rocks and abseiling nine metres underground in East Gippsland.
And when they got to their subterranean destination recently, they found the animal fossil precisely where they expected it to be, lying intact on the cave floor, glued in place by calcite crystals, exactly where it was discovered 40 years ago.
The strange fossilised animal skeleton they assessed thanks to the light from their powerful head-torches stretched out for about half-a-metre, where it had laid undisturbed but perfectly preserved for hundreds, and possibly thousands, of years in the dark.
Inspecting the animal fossil deep underground. Photo: Liz Rogers
The group took photographs, which they forwarded to Museum Victoria mammal expert Kevin Rowe for examination. And he concluded that the fossil probably belonged to an extinct native mammal known as the White-footed Rabbit Rat, or Conilurus albipes.
"Based on the size of the animal, the shape of the jaw, and the location of the cave in Victoria this is probably a White-footed Rabbit Rat, most of which in Victoria are known from small fragments in owl pellets. There's also a chance that it is the remains of a previously unknown species", Dr Rowe said.
The small native rodent, which is a distant relative of the common rat and the house mouse, is now extinct in Australia, but live specimens of the animal were painted by the famous ornithologist and bird artist John Gould in the 1850s.
John Gould painting of the White-footed Rabbit Rat.
Parks Victoria's chief conservation scientist, Mark Norman, said the animal probably became extinct in the 1860s after succumbing to pressure on its habitat and predation by cats and foxes.
"This discovery reminds us of how vulnerable our native wildlife is and how permanent extinction is," Dr Norman said. "The rabbit rat was one of 30 mammal species that went extinct in Australia in just 100 years. This is why Parks Victoria spends so much effort controlling feral predators like cats and foxes to protect remaining vulnerable species.
"It's the only fossilised version of the White-footed Rabbit Rat that's ever known, but this is something that's gone extinct in the last 150 years ... this one's a perfectly preserved fossil that could be hundreds to thousands of years old.
"It's in fantastic condition. You can even see the brown smear around it from where the fur and the flesh has rotted into the floor. It's just died like something in Lord of the Rings, in some back corner of a cave well underground."
A Gippsland caver in search of the White-footed Rabbit Rat fossil.
Parks Victoria East Gippsland district manager, Will McCutcheon, said the fossil would remain where it was found.
"It's a poignant discovery, really, as this individual rabbit rat probably died lost in these caves well before any colonial settlement, at a time when there was a healthy population of rabbit rats right across Victoria," he said.
