Scientists reveal the face of Australia’s massive, extinct “giga-goose”
roamed the Australian continent—including a wombat relative the size of a rhinoceros, a monitor lizard as long as a crocodile, a heavy-setIn 1893 camel-riding palaeontologists dug up a nearly complete skeleton of a massive bird that, tens of thousands of years prior, had gotten itself mired in the mud of Lake Callabonna in South Australia.
“The skull is what will retain those more complex family indicators,” McInerney says. “So for the last 120 or so years we have been looking for better skull fossils.”, plus a collection of beautifully preserved partial skulls they unearthed at Lake Callabonna between 2013 and 2019. “Seeing the skull fully out of the matrix and free from the dirt around it was definitely a ‘wow’ event,” McInerney says.
“There’s no close analogue for these birds” elsewhere in the world, says Nic Rawlence, a paleoecologist at New Zealand’s University of Otago, who was not involved in the research. “They are a truly unique Australian island experiment, as unique as koalas and kangaroos,” he adds. “With this amazing new discovery, we can now actually start to reconstruct the evolution and the behavior of this animal.
Scientists are also still debating why Australia’s megafauna vanished. When humans arrived on the continent, its once-lush landscape was. The extinctions may have been triggered by climate change, hunting or a combination of both. Today Lake Callabonna is mostly dry, salty and treeless—no place for a water-loving giga-goose.
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