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Early Australians May Have Lived With Giant Lizards

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Thanh Duoung
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« on: October 05, 2015, 12:48:54 am »

Early Australians May Have Lived With Giant Lizards
Researchers discover early Australians shared the continent with enormous lizards
Lizard
(Frans Lanting/Corbis)
By Danny Lewis
smithsonian.com
September 25, 2015



Stories of giant lizards roaming the Australian outback might seem like just another Bigfoot myth, but newly-discovered fossils suggest that it wasn’t just a tall tale for the first humans to set foot down under.

A group of paleontologists with the University of Queensland were shocked while on a recent dig in Central Queensland, when they discovered fossil fragments from a giant lizard just a few meters below the surface of the earth. When the fossils were finally dated, they realized that the lizard lived about 50,000 years ago – the same time as the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians first arrived on the continent.

"Our jaws dropped when we found a tiny fossil from a giant lizard during a two metre deep excavation in one of the Capricorn Caves, near Rockhampton," vertebrate paleoecologist Gilbert Price said in a statement. "The one-centimetre bone, an osteoderm, came from under the lizard's skin and is the youngest record of a giant lizard on the entire continent."

According to a new study of the fossil fragments, it’s unclear whether the bone shards belonged to a Komodo dragon, which once roamed Australia, or the extinct Megalania monitor lizard, which could grow up to almost 20 feet long and weighed around 1,100 pounds. Whichever giant lizard the bone fragment belonged to, it was an apex predator of some sort that might have existed alongside the early Aborigines, Conor Gaffey writes for Newsweek.

Back during the Pleistocene epoch, which the lizard fossil dates back to, Australia was home to a number of enormous animals roaming the outback: wombats as big as rhinos, massive snakes and seven-foot-tall kangaroos are just some of the animals whose remains paleontologists have discovered in caves across the continent, Joel Achenbach wrote for National Geographic in 2010. But while researchers have long known that humans existed alongside these giant animals, this is the first evidence of a giant lizard living during the same era.

"It's been long-debated whether or not humans or climate change knocked off the giant lizards, alongside the rest of the megafauna," Price said in a statement. "Humans can only now be considered as potential drivers of their extinction."

While many scientists believe that most species of Australian megafauna were wiped out during the last Ice Age about 12,000 years ago, some have argued that their extinction was due in part to humans. While it appears that the giant lizards in question died off long before the Ice Age occurred, the fact that it shared the outback with the Aborigines’ ancestors could suggest that they might have been some of the first megafauna to succumb to humanity’s spread across the planet.
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Thanh Duoung
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« Reply #1 on: October 05, 2015, 12:49:10 am »

I have a link to the original research article about the Aussie giant lizards for anyone interested: http://authors.elsevier.com/a/... (It's a free download until the 11th of October, then it'll go behind a paywall). Cheers, Gilbert (lead author of the new study).
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Thanh Duoung
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« Reply #2 on: October 05, 2015, 12:49:45 am »

How would aborigines have held the upper hand against 20 foot long Monitor lizards? Fire.This sharing of Down Under by Humans and giant monitors seems to have surprised everyone except those like myself that watch the Discovery Channel et al religiously for the last of couple of decades. A documentary on the loss of Mega fauna down Under or how the aborigines changed their world, can't remember the title angle, simply pointed out that Humans use fire to chase prey animals out of hiding and grab a cooked meal. Fire was used in the Americas and Australia too, consciously or unconsciously, change the environment around native settlements. The first Europeans arriving in North America noted until well into the eighteenth century that the forests east of the Mississippi were like parkland and easy to walk through. Not wild tangled forests usually found in nature. (West of the Mississippi was largely prairie and there too fire was used extensively in hunting the buffalo, I grew up calling it that so don't yap about Bison to me). Controlled fired probably preceded the aborigines across Australia and brought the larger critters down a few notches as they ran from fires into spears or eventually found the landscape no longer capable of supporting them. Having fire, something as simple as knowing wind direction, knowing where you want the burning to be and being able to start a fire on a dime was as powerful a weapon to our ancestors 50,000 years ago as atomic power today in dividing up the world of nation states between predator and prey .
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« Reply #3 on: October 05, 2015, 12:50:35 am »

http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1RaHl-4PRehV9

original research article about the Aussie giant lizards, free download until the 11th of October
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Thanh Duoung
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« Reply #4 on: October 05, 2015, 12:51:37 am »

Early Australians lived with giant lizards
Posted on Saturday, 26 September, 2015



Australia's first humans may have lived alongside huge lizards. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Greg Hume
New evidence suggests that Australia was once home to huge reptiles that lived alongside early humans.
When the ancestors of today's Aboriginal Australians first arrived on the continent they would have encountered a landscape dominated by a menagerie of prehistoric giants including wombats the size of rhinos, seven-feet-tall kangaroos and now, according to palaeontologists from the University of Queensland, huge lizards that grew up to 20ft in length and weighed in excess of 1,100 pounds.

The fact that humans shared the Australian outback with these huge reptiles was discovered thanks to the fossil fragments of a giant lizard found during a recent dig in Central Queensland.

"Our jaws dropped when we found a tiny fossil from a giant lizard during a two metre deep excavation in one of the Capricorn Caves, near Rockhampton," said vertebrate paleoecologist Gilbert Price.

"The one-centimetre bone, an osteoderm, came from under the lizard's skin and is the youngest record of a giant lizard on the entire continent."

While scientists had long known that the first humans in Australia lived alongside many large types of animals this find represents the first direct evidence that giant lizards were among them.

"It's been long-debated whether or not humans or climate change knocked off the giant lizards, alongside the rest of the megafauna," said Price.

"Humans can only now be considered as potential drivers of their extinction."

   http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/early-australians-may-have-fought-giant-lizards-supremacy-180956747/?no-ist
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