--- title: "Crash bandicoot is a real extinct marsupial; a 14.6-million-year-old Queensland jaw named for the game" url: https://badiyaa.com/crash-bandicoot-extinct-marsupial-species-fossil/ published: 2026-11-13T10:09:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-13T10:09:00+00:00 section: Science publisher: Badiyaa --- # Crash bandicoot is a real extinct marsupial; a 14.6-million-year-old Queensland jaw named for the game Crash bandicoot is also the name of an extinct Queensland marsupial, known from one 14.6-million-year-old jaw and named after the game in 2014. Crash Bandicoot is not only a PlayStation mascot. It is also the official scientific name of an extinct marsupial that lived in Queensland, Australia, roughly 14.6 million years ago, and the entire species is known from a single piece of fossil upper jaw holding three teeth. Paleontologists Kenny Travouillon, Suzanne Hand, Michael Archer and Karen Black named the animal in 2014, giving it the genus *Crash* and the species name *bandicoot*. Written in proper form, its binomial is *Crash bandicoot*, and it is the only member of its genus. ## Why scientists named it after a video game The main reason is the obvious one: the orange hero of Naughty Dog’s 1996 platform game. The game’s own development history says the team picked a bandicoot from a field guide to Tasmanian mammals because it wanted an animal that was appealing and obscure, and that the character is an eastern barred bandicoot. The name “Crash” came from his habit of smashing crates. The authors added a second, scientific joke. The name also refers to bandicoots “crashing” out of wet rainforest and spreading into the semiarid and arid country that most living bandicoots prefer today. The fossil hints at that story, because it comes from a site that was rainforest at the time. ## One jawbone, three teeth The only known specimen, catalogued as QM F56245, is a right maxillary fragment, part of the upper jaw. It still holds the first three molars and the empty sockets of the fourth. Researchers freed it from its limestone block by dissolving the rock in acid. Teeth carry a lot of information in mammal paleontology. From their size alone, the team estimated that *Crash* weighed about 1.08 kilograms, or roughly 2.4 pounds, making it a fairly large bandicoot. Its molars also show a mix of features, including an unusual cusp on the first and third molars not seen in any other bandicoot. Those tooth details place it among the modern bandicoots, close to the living genera *Perameles* and *Isoodon*. If that placement holds, *Crash* is the oldest modern bandicoot known by at least 5 to 10 million years. A 2016 study of another fossil group was less certain and placed it just outside that modern group, so the exact family tree is still debated. ## A cave that worked as a trap The jaw came from a site called Alan’s Ledge 1990, inside the Riversleigh World Heritage Area in north-western Queensland. Riversleigh was listed by UNESCO in 1994 alongside South Australia’s Naracoorte Caves, and its soft freshwater limestone keeps bones in three dimensions instead of crushing them flat. Dating of cave formations puts the deposit at 14.64 million years old, give or take 470,000 years. The cave mouth seems to have worked as a natural pitfall trap beside lowland rainforest. *Crash* shared that forest with a much smaller insect-eating bandicoot, *Bulungu palara*, plus possums, early koalas, kangaroo relatives and bats. ## The numbers, side by side - **Game release:** September 9, 1996, in North America. - **Species named:** 2014, 18 years later. - **Age of the fossil:** about 14.64 million years. - **Specimen:** one partial upper jaw with three molars. - **Estimated weight:** 1.08 kilograms (2.38 pounds). Put another way, 14.64 million years is roughly 7,000 times the 2,070 years since Julius Caesar died in 44 BC, yet researchers needed only three teeth to give it a name that every PlayStation owner of the 1990s recognizes. Small fossils telling big stories are a recurring theme: see how [two teeth revealed Yakamys, a 30-kilogram rodent from Thailand](https://badiyaa.com/yakamys-giant-rodent-thailand-fossil-teeth/), and how [four fossil teeth from Peru showed monkeys crossed the Atlantic on rafts](https://badiyaa.com/ucayalipithecus-monkeys-crossed-atlantic-rafts-peru-teeth/). ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Crash bandicoot (species)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_bandicoot_(species)) - [Wikipedia: Riversleigh World Heritage Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riversleigh_World_Heritage_Area) - [Wikipedia: Crash Bandicoot (video game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_Bandicoot_(video_game)) *Image: JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*