The findings of a group of Australian palaeontologists suggest that climate change was not to blame for the extinction of the Australian Pleistocene megafauna.

In 2002, John Long of the Western Australian Museum in Perth organized a series of expeditions to three caverns in the Nullarbor Plain of south-central Australia, where numerous fossils had been found. His team included specialists in Pleistocene cave sites, megafauna, small vertebrate fauna, microfossils and isotope geochemistry.

The authors identified one gastropod and 69 vertebrate species, including eight previously undocumented kangaroo species. After four years of evaluating their findings, they realized that new species were only part of the discovery. They had assumed that the Nullarbor Plain must have been substantially wetter than it is today in order to explain the diversity and number of the megafauna. But their evidence suggested that the environment was just as arid 400,000 to 800,000 years ago (see page 422).

The researchers note that in the 500,000 years before their extinction the megafauna of southeastern Australia were resilient to climate change. The team speculates that, rather than climate change, increased bushfires, possibly lit by humans, spurred their demise.