Sarcophilus is a genus of carnivorous marsupial

Dasyuridae

Dasyuridae is a family of marsupials native to Australia and New Guinea, including 61 species divided into 15 genera. Many are small and mouse-like, giving them the misnomer marsupial mice, but the group also includes the cat-sized quolls, as well as the Tasmanian Devil...

 best known for its only living member, the Tasmanian Devil

Tasmanian Devil

The Tasmanian devil is a carnivorous marsupial of the family Dasyuridae, now found in the wild only on the Australian island state of Tasmania. The size of a small dog, it became the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world following the extinction of the thylacine in 1936...

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There are three species of Sarcophilus. S. laniarius and S. moornaensis are only known from fossils from the Pleistocene

Pleistocene

The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....

. S. laniarius was larger than the contemporary, and only surviving, species S. harrisii, weighing up to 10 kilograms more. The relationship between the three species is unclear; while some have proposed that S. harrisii may be a dwarf

Insular dwarfism

Insular dwarfism, a form of phyletic dwarfism, is the process and condition of the reduction in size of large animals – typically mammals – when their population's range is limited to a small environment, primarily islands. This natural process is distinct from the intentional creation of dwarf...

version of S. laniarius, others argue that it is a completely different species and that the two may have coexisted during the Pleistocene.