Early Australians lived alongside giant killer lizards

Life as a human on this planet before the dawn of modern industrial civilization was probably pretty tough.

In particular, it is the first evidence that Australia’s early human inhabitants and giant apex predator lizards overlapped.

The team, directed by Dr Gilbert Price of the University of Queensland, unearthed the first evidence that Australia’s first human inhabitants and giant apex predator lizards had overlapped.

“Our jaws dropped when we found a tiny fossil from a giant lizard during a two metre deep excavation in one of the Capricorn Caves, near Rockhampton”, Dr Price said. It is the youngest record of one of the giant lizards on the entire continent of Australia. This means it’s not so much a proper bone as a bony plate originating from the creature’s skin.

It’s actually no surprise that the researchers managed to snag a fossil. The Megalania was larger than the Komodo dragon, and tipped the weighing scale at about 1,000 pounds and could reach up to 20 feet in length.

A look squad from Australia has created an allegation that this first individual tenants inside the country could’ve live alongside an incredible, alarming lizards.

For a while, early humans and the ancient predators coexisted in this corner of the world. It likely fed on giant marsupials like Diprotodon, in addition to other lizards, small mammals, and birds. It joins the Komodo dragon and lace monitor in the class Toxicofera, which includes all other reptiles that have oral glands that secrete toxin. But as some point during the last Ice Age, they disappeared. It was likely the largest venomous vertebrate ever discovered. That would coincide with the arrival of Australia’s Aboriginal inhabitants.

Today, Australia’s largest lizard is a type of goanna, or monitor lizard, called a parentie that grows to a mere six feet (two meters) long.

In the last Ice Age, massive lizards and inland crocodiles measuring up to nine meters long once roamed Australia during the Pleistocene epoch, according to researchers. The findings of the team were based on the discovery of the lizard fossils.

‘It’s been long-debated whether or not humans or climate change knocked off the giant lizards, alongside the rest of the megafauna, ‘ researcher Dr Price said.

It was discovered with the help of citizen scientists taking part in the sieving and sorting specimens from a site known as the Capricorn Caves in northeastern Australia, the continent’s most fossil-rich location, the researchers say.