prediction for future fossil discovery
this is kangacetus murrayei meaning kangaroo whale from the murray river where its fossils were discovered in 2030, its part of a completely extinct family of aussie marsupials called Macropodicetidae, it evolved for the same reason pakicetus did but was able to avoid competition with crocs by niche partitioning for the herbivore of the waters, which made it so that it had no real evolutionary pressure to move to the ocean & so it simple as that never developed to become permaneantly aquatic which at the end of the eocene led to its extinction. the reason they went extinct was caus as the continent of australia moved north the country began to dry out & combined with the eocene extinction it was unable to survive as the crocs could survive caus they were carnivores that could hunt them & passerby animals & so as the rivers it relied on dried up it slowly went extinct as unfortunately the adaptations werent so good anymore. it took several days for paleontologists to get it outta the ground caus of flooding, the main worry is that flooding would wash the bone away so they collected the important parts first, the skeleton was full of missing parts & the skull had missing bits but they did it, at first tho they couldnt figure out wtf it was, as in they knew it was a kangaroo but the backside looked weird.Eocene–Oligocene extinction event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_history_of_Australia#:~:text=Australia%20separated%20from%20Antarctica%20in,within%20the%20last%205%20Ma.
