People love to marvel over how everything living thing in Australia can kill you, but as it turns out, modern humans have it easy. When the first of our species arrived on the continent some 50,000 years ago, the creatures they faced put current ones to shame.
Australia was dominated by megafauna—or any animal over 100 pounds (44 kilos) by adulthood—and humans likely coexisted with these animals for upwards of thousands of years before they (thankfully) went extinct.
Let’s start off with a “gentler” animal. goliah is the largest kangaroo that ever existed (that we know of). While it measures in at about 6.6 feet tall (2 meters)—roughly the same height as the modern red kangaroo—it was 2.5 times heavier, coming in at nearly 450 pounds (200 kilograms). It could reach leaves in trees about 10 feet (3 meters) up and had long, recurved claws to grasp branches.
Artist’s rendering of Procoptodon goliah. Credit: Wikipedia
Also known as the marsupial lion, this is the largest mammalian carnivore ever found in Australia. It was about 5 feet (1.5 meters) long and 2.5 (75 centimeters) feet tall. Marsupial lions had powerful jaws, with calculations showing it had the strongest bite of any known mammal. They also had forelimbs with semi-opposable “thumbs” and retractable claws, which they used to hunt prey and climb trees. carnifex went extinct around 46,000 years ago.
Artist’s rendering of Thylacoleo carnifex. Credit: Wikipedia
This guy resembled a giant wombat, and seems to have been preyed on by marsupial lions. It is the largest known marsupial; its length was 12.5 feet (3.8 meters), and it weighed up to 6,200 pounds (2,800 kilos). optatum seems to have preferred flat, open habitats like savannahs, where it browsed on shrubs and forbs. Fascinatingly, it co-existed with humans for around 25,000 years before going extinct.
Artist’s rendering of Diprotodon optatum. Credit: Dmitry Bogdanov/Wikipedia
Modern crocodiles are plenty scary, but in terms of threat to humans, there’s a limitation: We’re usually terrestrial, whereas crocs are fairly restricted to killing things in or around water. Quinkana, a 16- to 19.5-foot (5-6 meter) croc that disappeared around 40,000 years ago, however, wasn’t limited in this way. Quinkana had knife-like, serrated teeth, and was fully terrestrial, using its long legs to possibly chase down land-based prey in a way that modern, short-legged aquatic crocs can’t.
Credit: www.prehistoric-wildlife.com
This is the crown jewel of Aussie megafauna. It was a carnivorous lizard—specifically a goanna—which ranged from 11 to 16 feet (3.5 to 5 meters) in length and weighed up to 4,200 pounds (1,940 kilos). For those wondering, that little fact makes it the largest terrestrial lizard ever found. Paleontologists believe it would have been a predator at the top of the food chain, preying on large prey such as pygmy elephants and deer. It’s suspected that it had toxic, bacteria-laden saliva and roamed open forests, woodlands, and grasslands, waiting to ambush and kill its prey.
Credit: http://www.outdoordesign.com.au/Landscaping-Hard-Product-Supply/garden-public-art/Giant-Australian-Prehistoric-Megalania-Natureworks/291.htm
Around 85 percent of Australia’s megafauna went extinct after humans arrived 50,000 or so years ago—and it’s largely hypothesized (and hotly debated) that humans’ drove this process forward, perhaps thanks to their consumption of limited resources the animals relied on to survive. In fact, a very recent paper has found proof that humans drove another megafauna species—a 500-pound flightless bird known as Genyornis newtoni—to its untimely demise by consuming the birds’ eggs. Regardless, we’re sure many Australians are happy not to have to live between deadly spiders and 16-foot carnivorous lizards.
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Feature Image: Feature Image: An illustration of a giant flightless bird known as Genyornis newtoni, surprised on her nest by a 1 ton, predatory lizard named Megalania prisca in Australia roughly 50,000 thousand years ago. (Credit: Illustration by Peter Trusler, Monash University)
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