Editing Diprotodon (section)

===Mythology===
[[File:Bunyip 1890 (cropped).jpg|left|thumb|''Diprotodon'', soon after discovery, was associated with the [[bunyip]] (above drawn by J. Mcfarlane, 1890).<ref name="Holden"/>]]

When the first massive fossils in Australia were dug up, it was not clear what animals they might have represented because there were no serious scientists on the continent. Local residents guessed some may have been the remains of rhinos or elephants. European settlers, the most-vocal of whom was Reverend John Dunmore Lang, forwarded these fossils as evidence of the [[Genesis flood narrative]]. Aboriginal Australians also attempted to fit the finds into their own religious ideas, quickly associating ''Diprotodon'' with the [[bunyip]], a large, carnivorous, lake monster. Many ethnologists and palaeontologists of the time believed the bunyip to be a [[folk memory|tribal memory]] of the lumbering giant creature that probably frequented marshlands, though at the time it was uncertain whether ''Diprotodon'' and other megafauna were still extant because the Australian continent had not yet been fully explored by Europeans. Scientific investigation into the bunyip was stigmatised after a purported bunyip skull was sensationalised in 1846, and was put on display at the [[Australian Museum]]. The following year, however, Owen recognised it as the skull of a foal, and was surprised the burgeoning Australian scientific community could have erred so egregiously.<ref name="Holden"/>

In 1892, Canadian geologist [[Henry Yorke Lyell Brown]] reported Aboriginal Australians identified ''Diprotodon'' fossils from [[Lake Eyre]] as those of the [[Rainbow Serpent]], which he thought was a giant, bottom-dwelling fish. This notion became somewhat popularised after English geologist [[John Walter Gregory]], who believed the god was a horned, scaly creature, conjectured it was a chimaera of ''Diprotodon''—which he believed had a horn—and a crocodile. Later workers continued to report some link between the Rainbow Serpent and either ''Diprotodon'' or crocodiles.<ref name=Smith2018/>

These kinds of suppositions are not testable and require stories to survive in [[oral tradition]] for tens of thousands of years.<ref name=Smith2018>{{cite journal|last=Smith|first=M. A.|title=The historiography of ''kardimarkara'': Reading a desert tradition as cultural memory of the remote past|journal=Journal of Social Archaeology|year=2019 |volume=19 |pages=1–20|doi=10.1177/1469605318817685 |s2cid=150217104 |doi-access=free}}</ref> If Pleistocene megafauna are the basis of some aboriginal mythology, it is unclear if the stories were based on the creatures when they were alive or their fossils being discovered long after their extinction.<ref>{{cite book|editor1-first = P. |editor1-last = Vikers-Rich |editor2-first = J. M. |editor2-last = Monaghan |editor3-first = R.F. |editor3-last = Baird |editor4-first = T.H. |editor4-last = Rich |year = 1991 |title = Vertebrate Palaeontology of Australasia |page = 2 |publisher = Pioneer Design Studio and Monash University |isbn = 978-0-909674-36-6 |url = https://archive.org/details/Vertebratepalae00PVic/page/2 }}</ref>