Unlike their fictional cousin Godzilla, diprotodons and megalanias are not yet household names.
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But a group of school students from Wellington are hoping to change that.
They've been taking part in a program called Digging Deep Time, where they're not only learning about the giant creatures which once roamed the western plains but also sharing their knowledge with the community.
"At the start I remember walking into a classroom of 30 kids who knew anything about megafauna and they had blank faces," Vince Lovecchio, creative director of the group behind the initiative The Project Zone, said.
"My next question was 'who knows Godzilla?'. And all their hands went up. So I say, 'you're kidding me, that's not even a real one'.
"It's make believe and Japan's making billions of dollars from tourists who go there because of the movies but Welligton's got about ten Godzillas - real ones - and everybody should know about it."

The Digging Deep Time program - run in partnership with Dubbo Regional Council and Flinders University - sees local students create artworks, short films and documentaries focusing on the significance of megafauna in Wellington.
The Wellington caves were the site where the first megafauna fossils were discovered in Australia.
The floors of the cave system's deep chambers are covered by layers of silt built up over hundreds of thousands of years holding a treasure trove of fossils.
In the silt researchers have discovered fossils of creatures like the diprotodon, a rhinoceros-sized wombat, and the megalania, a lizard the length of a truck that early inhabitants of the area would have come face-to-face with.
The films created by the students include historical re-enactments of significant events in the megafauna story, stories from Wiradjuri elders and tourism-oriented promotional films.
"Some of the teachers thought it was impossible getting kids to learn history but we know you can when you engage kids and make them part of the process and give them ownership," Mr Lovecchio said.
In October, Project Zone was announced as the winner of a Heritage and Cultural Award at the 2023 NSW Tidy Town Awards, an honour Mr Lovecchio said was "humbling".
"It just validates the work we're doing," he said.
"I don't do these things for awards, I do it because I love seeing young people achieve their full potential and, at the same time, communities as well reaching theirs.
"We hope this accolade will pave the way for additional support in advancing its future development."
The short films and artworks created by the students will be showcased as part of a live streaming event broadcast directly from the Wellington Caves Complex to schools around NSW on Thursday, December 7.
"There's a great joy I think I see when you put trust into the kids enough that you're going to have a major public exhibition and they're part of it and it's driven by them, it's about them," Mr Lovecchio said.
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