Did climate shift kill giant Australian animals?
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/0505…050523-11.html An Australian research group may ease humanity’s collective conscience over a spate of prehistoric extinctions on the southern continent. The die-off, they say, was not the rapacious work of newly arrived humans, but was due rather to changing climate. Australia’s large prehistoric animals, called megafauna, were as bizarre as anything that lives there today. King of them all was the marsupial lion, a 130-kilogram meat-eater who lived alongside giant kangaroos, huge lizards called goannas, and Diprotodon, which resembled a three-tonne wombat. After the arrival of humans on the continent, at least 45,000 years ago, these weird and wonderful creatures began to die out. Experts blamed the colonizers, arguing that they launched a hunting ‘blitzkrieg’ that wiped out the megafauna within a few generations. But the animals may have survived for a lot longer than people thought, argues Judith Field of the University of Sydney, who has analy
