Bite Club
There are a fair few animals knocking around Australia that you wouldn’t want to bump into. The world’s ten most poisonous snakes for starters; then there’s the red-back spider - a vicious cousin of the deadly black widow; but all of these would quail in front of the biggest gnasher of them all.
For all the malignant beasts wandering the Aussie landscapes, there’s one that makes the others look positively feeble: the marsupial lion. Looking more like a small bear than a lion and weighing in at around 100kg (16 stone), the marsupial lion, or Thylacoleo carnifex as it’s known in the trade, has recently been awarded the accolade of having the strongest bite of any creature. So it’s probably just as well that it’s been extinct for the last 45,000 years.
A team of researchers, led by the University of Sydney’s carnivore expert Dr. Stephen Wroe, compared 31 living an