When people first arrived in what is now Queensland, they would have found the land inhabited by massive animals including goannas six meters long and kangaroos twice as tall as a human.
We have studied fossil bones of these animals for the past decade. Our findings, published last month in Nature Communications , shed new light on the mystery of what drove these ancient megafauna to extinction.
The first bones were found by the Barada Barna people during cultural heritage surveys on their traditional lands about 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Mackay, at South Walker Creek Mine. Our study shares the first reliable glimpse of the giants that roamed the Australian tropics between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago.
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