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Articles on Megafaunal extinction

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The extinct Australian giant flightless bird, Genyornis newtoni. Used with permission; all other rights reserved. Jacob C. Blokland

New fossils show what Australia’s giant prehistoric ‘thunder birds’ looked like – and offer clues about how they died out

A recent find of an ancient giant bird’s skull has revealed much about its life among the vanished lakes and wetlands of inland South Australia.
A flock of vultures (Cryptogyps lacertosus) and Australian ravens watch and wait (left), as an adult eagle Dynatoaetus pachyosteus feeds on the carcass of a dead Diprotodon (centre), while a younger bird seeks to join in. In the nearby treetops, a second adult D. pachyosteus feeds its hungry chick (right). John Barrie

Giant eagles and scavenging vultures shared the skies of ancient Australia

New fossils reveal Australia was once home to a much greater diversity of huge eagles and vultures, which died off alongside ‘giant wombats’ and ‘marsupial lions’.
Animals that shared the landscape with humans disappeared as the ice age ended. Mauricio Antón/Wikimedia Commons

Forensic evidence suggests Paleo-Americans hunted mastodons, mammoths and other megafauna in eastern North America 13,000 years ago

A forensic technique more often used at modern crime scenes identified blood residue from large extinct animals on spearpoints and stone tools used by people who lived in the Carolinas millennia ago.
North America during the late Pleistocene: a pack of dire wolves (red hair) are feeding bison while a pair of grey wolves approach in the hopes of scavenging. Mauricio Antón

Dire wolves went extinct 13,000 years ago but thanks to new genetic analysis their true story can now be told

Our research shows dire wolves lived in the tropics not the Arctic, and were not especially close relatives of the grey wolf.
Life and death in tropical Australia, 40,000 years ago. Giant reptiles ruled northern Australia during the Pleistocene with mega-marsupials as their prey. Image Credit: R. Bargiel, V. Konstantinov, A. Atuchin & S. Hocknull (2020). Queensland Museum.

Humans coexisted with three-tonne marsupials and lizards as long as cars in ancient Australia

These megafauna were the largest land animals to live in Australia since the time of the dinosaurs.

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