A new picture has emerged after a palaeontologist at the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia, Gilbert Price, and his colleagues scoured the scientific literature on new fossil discoveries from the past 15 years. The finds when added together show that Australia had a much greater diversity of ice age reptiles than is widely accepted in the world.
This diversity includes 200-kilogram relatives of Komodo dragons. They were three to four times the size of those existing today, and had long legs and were like land-living crocodiles. Price and his colleagues have also made new yet unpublished fossil discoveries. The discovery reinforces the idea that the continent was dominated by reptilian predators for much of the past 25 million years, up until at least 100,000 years ago.
Saber-toothed cats, short-faced bears, and other ferocious mammals were the top predators of the ice age across most of the world. But not in Australia. Here, reptiles ruled: land-living crocs, monstrous snakes, and enormous relatives of the Komodo dragon, according to a study presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology here. The disappearance of these animals, the researchers argue, made room for mammalian predators to take over and set the stage for a massive extinction crisis that accelerated when Europeans arrived 200 years ago.
Kenny Travouillon, a palaeontologist at the Western Australian Museum in Perth who wasn’t part of the research team has said that between the expansion of agriculture in Australia which changed its landscape, and the predators that came in, there was no way for native animals to escape.