The Fate(s) of Australia’s Mega-Mammals

While in Sydney earlier this year, I stopped in at Australia Museum, the citys equivalent of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and learned a bit about the continents extinct megafauna. Australia didnt have

But this story was incomplete it seems, though the museum holds no blame. A couple weeks after I returned to Washington, Science published a study addressing this very issue (for all the megafauna but the thylacine, but well get to the tigers in a moment). Susan Rule of Australian National University and her colleagues analyzed pollen and charcoal in two sediment cores taken from a lake in northeast Australia to create a record of vegetation, fire and climate changes over the past 130,000... [via Smithsonianmag - Science]