![]() The abundance of these spores is good evidence for a lot of large mammals on the southwestern Australian landscape up until about 45,000 years ago. Then, suddenly, the number of spores in the sediments went into a nosedive. Miller said his team found the spores in abundance in the sediment layers from 150,000 years ago to about 45,000 years ago. In the past, as now, this spore thrived on the dung of plant-eating mammals. He said the sediments his team exacontained dust, pollen, ash and spores from a fungus called Sporormiella, which can still be found today in the dung of domestic livestock. He said in a statement from CU Boulder that the sediment core let scientists look back more than 150,000 years, a time period spanning Earth’s last full glacial cycle. Gifford Miller at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) was a member of the research team. The team’s paper on this subject was published online Januin the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications. The core contains layers of material blown and washed into the ocean over time, and so looking deeper in the sediments is the same as looking deeper into the past. After that time, those huge creatures had disappeared.Ī science team led by Sander van der Kaars of Monash University in Australia used information from a sediment core drilled in the Indian Ocean off the coast of southwest Australia to help reconstruct past climate and ecosystems on the Australian continent. Prior to that time, were 1,000-pound kangaroos in Australia, 2-ton wombats, 25-foot-long lizards, 400-pound flightless birds, 300-pound marsupial lions and Volkswagen-sized tortoises. Instead, the evidence suggests that humans were the primary cause of these unique creatures’ sudden extinction some 45,000 years ago. There’s new evidence that some of the large creatures that once roamed Australia – what scienitsts call Australia’s ancient megafauna – didn’t disappear due to climate change as had been proposed earlier. Australian megafauna art by Peter Trusler, via CU Boulder.
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