This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
28.16040° S, 145.04763° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Kenny was a wombat the size of a car, and he was found just outside Eulo.
Diprotodon optatum is the largest marsupial known to have existed – a heavy, four-legged plant-eater, related distantly to wombats and koalas, that ranged across Australia until the late Pleistocene. In 2011 the site of one of Australia's most concentrated accumulations of megafauna fossils was identified near Eulo, and among the material recovered was a large Diprotodon that the dig nicknamed Kenny.
The bronze in the centre of town is his reconstruction. Like the elasmosaur at Chillagoe, it is deliberately not a Big Thing in the usual sense: it is built at full life size rather than exaggerated, so the shock is supposed to come from accuracy rather than scale. Standing next to it is the closest anyone gets to standing next to the animal.
Eulo is a very small place in the Paroo country of south-west Queensland, better known to travellers for its mud springs and its opal. A fossil bed of this quality is the sort of thing that would ordinarily be known only to palaeontologists and the landholders whose paddock it is in. Putting Kenny in the main street is the town's way of refusing that – a claim, made in bronze, that the interesting thing about Eulo is not only what is on the surface.
The megafauna question hangs over the whole subject. Diprotodon and the other giant marsupials disappeared from Australia in the late Pleistocene, and the causes – climate drying, human arrival, fire regimes, or some combination – remain genuinely and actively disputed among researchers. This entry does not take a position on it, because the science has not settled.
What is not disputed is that they were here, in numbers, in country that is now the Paroo. Kenny stands in the main street of a town of a few dozen people, at exactly the size the animal was, which is the most direct way of making that fact land.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Kenny represents Australia’s largest known marsupial and is reconstructed at full size rather than deliberately enlarged, so Because he is reconstructed at full size rather than deliberately enlarged, he sits in the Related rather than Core category.
ACCESS
Kenny stands in central Eulo opposite the Eulo Queen Hotel, close to the Paroo Shire Hall. Street-side access is straightforward; park lawfully in town rather than stopping in the traffic lane.
