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
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
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.
Dynatoaetus gaffae was twice the size of the wedge-tailed eagle we know today.
Mike Lee
The Earth has had at least five major ice ages, and humans showed up in time for the most recent one. In fact, we’re still in it.
Genetic material found in permafrost sediments from the Yukon contains rich information about ancient ecosystems.
(Julius Csotonyi/Government of Yukon)
Permafrost in the Yukon is a treasure trove of ancient environmental DNA, but climate change threatens these rich historical archives.
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
Several theories have suggested either humans, climate change or both drove megafauna extinctions in Southeast Asia. Our newest work suggests otherwise.
The extinct Mukupirna - which translates to ‘big bones’ - is estimated to have been more than four times larger than any living wombat.
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.
Long-standing assumption that humans killed large mammals 4.5m years ago has been debunked by researchers – but some experts still think humans played a part in the demise of biodiversity
A modern mouse lemur Microcebus sits upon the cranium of an extinct Megaladapis lemur.
Dao Van Hoang www.daovanhoang.com
A series of new studies sheds light on the population crash and extinction of the giant birds, lemurs and more that roamed the island until around A.D. 700-1000.
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University