Humans caused extinction of ancient giant bird Study

Before the arrival of humans in Australia around 50,000 years ago, Genyornis newtoni inhabited almost the entire island continent.

However, humans were not the only factor that played a role in the extinction of the giant birds. But the scientists think that the Genyornis newtoni was a combination between scavengers and predators.

The large flightless bird can be pictured as considerably heavier and taller than the modern emu or ostrich.

“Australia’s megafauna extinctions are the most ancient”, he added. It stood seven feet tall and weighed upwards of 500 pounds.

Eggshells from the Genyornis newtoni’s eggs were found scattered on approximately 2000 sites across the Australian continent.

Prof. Miller and colleagues analysed several unburned Genyornis eggs from over 2,000 locations across Australia.

The particular evidence uncovered by the CU-Boulder team-burned eggshells-was found to date to this time period. In eggshell fragments burned at one end but not the other, there is a tell-tale “gradient” from total amino acid decomposition to minimal amino acid decomposition, he said.

The blackened fragments were likely burned in transient, human fires – presumably to cook the eggs – rather than in wildfires.

Miller explained that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, decompose in a predictable fashion inside eggshells over time. However, their big size was of no help for them when the humans arrived.

They discovered that the amino acids in the eggshells presented a gradient of decomposition, meaning that they were burnt.

Such a gradient is only possible if there had been a localized heat source, such as an ember, and not from the sustained high heat that one would get from wildfires, which have been common in Australia since prehistory.

The eggshell fragments were found in small, 10-foot clusters, and exhibited signs of being cooked in fires up to 1,000 Fahrenheit.

Australian postage stamp (2008) of Genyornis.

Try as they might, Miller and his team were unable to come up with a scenario in which the eggshell blackening occurred due to natural causes. The evidence consists of diagnostic burn patterns on Genyornis eggshell fragments that indicate humans were collecting and cooking its eggs, thereby reducing the birds’ reproductive success.

In a statement provided to Reuters, the mystery behind the extinction of a huge flightless bird called Genyornis that flourished in the grasslands and woodlands of prehistoric Australia may have been solved, with burned eggshells as the clue and people as the culprits. As a result, their massive eggs would have likely weighed 3.5 pounds.

– a 25-foot-long lizard.

Despite the impressive size of some ancient animals – like the wombat that was the size of a auto and the 1,000-pound (453 kg) kangaroo – they were no match for humans, since roughly 85 percent of these animals went extinct because of human activity.

The extinction of Australia’s huge megafauna is a hotly debated subject. Some scientists say humans are to blame, others credit climate change and some say it’s likely a mixture of both.

So far, it was believed that the megafauna could have been affected by some climate changes, a form of severe continental drying that happened about 40,000-60,000 years ago.

The studies, taken together, give new strength to the argument that humans have been shaping the landscapes we inhabit in dramatic ways for a very, very long time. As OSL revealed the burned eggshells were about 44,000 to 54,000 years old, or around the same time humans began to colonize Australia, that suggested humans may have been behind the birds’ extinction.

According to the new archeological findings, it is possible than an Australian giant bird became extinct after humans ate its eggs over 50,000 years ago.

The study was funded in part by the Australian Research Council and the US National Science Foundation. Nature Communications 7, Article number: 10496.