Climate change not to blame for late Quaternary megafauna extinctions in Australia

Simple item page
dc.contributor.author Saltre, Frederik
dc.contributor.author Rodriguez-Rey, M
dc.contributor.author Brook, Barry W
dc.contributor.author Johnson, Christopher N
dc.contributor.author Turney, Chris S M
dc.contributor.author Alroy, John
dc.contributor.author Cooper, Alan
dc.contributor.author Beeton, Nicholas
dc.contributor.author Bird, Michael I
dc.contributor.author Fordham, Damien A
dc.contributor.author Gillespie, Richard
dc.contributor.author Herrando-Perez, Salvador
dc.contributor.author Jacobs, Zenobia
dc.contributor.author Miller, Gifford H
dc.contributor.author Nogues-Bravo, David
dc.contributor.author Prideaux, Gavin John
dc.contributor.author Roberts, Richard Graham
dc.contributor.author Bradshaw, Corey J A
dc.date.accessioned 2016-07-14T02:19:06Z
dc.date.available 2016-07-14T02:19:06Z
dc.date.issued 2016
dc.description This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ en
dc.description.abstract Late Quaternary megafauna extinctions impoverished mammalian diversity worldwide. The causes of these extinctions in Australia are most controversial but essential to resolve, because this continent-wide event presaged similar losses that occurred thousands of years later on other continents. Here we apply a rigorous metadata analysis and new ensemble-hindcasting approach to 659 Australian megafauna fossil ages. When coupled with analysis of several high-resolution climate records, we show that megafaunal extinctions were broadly synchronous among genera and independent of climate aridity and variability in Australia over the last 120,000 years. Our results reject climate change as the primary driver of megafauna extinctions in the world’s most controversial context, and instead estimate that the megafauna disappeared Australia-wide ~13,500 years after human arrival, with shorter periods of coexistence in some regions. This is the first comprehensive approach to incorporate uncertainty in fossil ages, extinction timing and climatology, to quantify mechanisms of prehistorical extinctions. en
dc.identifier.citation Saltre, F. et al. Climate change not to blame for late Quaternary megafauna extinctions in Australia. Nat. Commun. 7:10511 doi: 10.1038/ncomms10511 (2016). en
dc.identifier.doi https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10511 en
dc.identifier.issn 2041-1723
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/2328/36209
dc.language.iso en
dc.publisher Nature Publishing Group en
dc.relation http://purl.org/au-research/grantsARC/FT130101728 en
dc.relation.grantnumber ARC/FT130101728
dc.rights Copyright 2016 The authors en
dc.rights.holder The authors en
dc.rights.license CC-BY
dc.subject Biological Sciences en
dc.subject evolution en
dc.subject paleontology en
dc.title Climate change not to blame for late Quaternary megafauna extinctions in Australia en
dc.type Article en
local.contributor.authorOrcidLookup Bradshaw, Corey J A: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5328-7741 en_US
Files
Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Saltre_ClimateChange_P2016.pdf
Size:
582.57 KB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
Published Version
Download
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
2.73 KB
Format:
Item-specific license agreed upon to submission
Description:
Download
Collections
Paleontology Collected Works
 Flinders Open Access Research