Reign of Papua New Guinea's megafauna lasted long after humans arrived

[UngulateNerd92]

A giant kangaroo that once roamed on four legs through remote forests in the Papua New Guinea Highlands may have survived as recently as 20,000 years ago—long after large-bodied megafauna on mainland Australia went extinct, new research indicates.

Flinders University paleontologists, working with Australian National University archaeologists and geoscientists, have used new techniques to re-examine megafauna bones from the rich Nombe Rock Shelter fossil site in Chimbu Province in a bid to better understand the intriguing natural history of Papua New Guinea.

Reign of Papua New Guinea's megafauna lasted long after humans arrived

 

[Pantheraman]

The extinction of many megafauna across the globe is perhaps one of the biggest, if not the biggest debate in Cenozoic paleontology. It's likely to have been a combination of factors, the factors being a changing climate, humans, and disease.

In Australia and northen Eurasia, I think it's clear a changing climate killed most of the megafauna. I say most because it's pretty weird that leopards of all things went extinct in Europe.