Scientific debate heats up over fate of Australia's dinosaurs

Dec 26, 2006, 18:54 GMT

Sydney - Palaeontology's angriest argument was given another nudge Tuesday with the release of research that claims Australia's giant prehistoric animals were killed off by Aborigines rather than climate change.

Flinders University's Gavin Prideaux said the fossil record showed that the megafauna - giant marsupials the size of small trucks - were able to survive floods and droughts.

They perished within 20,000 years of sharing the continent with humans, suggesting it was spears that did them in, rather than habitat changes. The giant kangaroos, 2.5-ton diprotodons vanished around 50,000 years ago.

'Climate change was certainly not the main culprit in the extinctions,' Prideaux told Australia's AAP news agency. 'Our data show that the megafauna was resilient to climatic fluctuations over the past half-million years.'

Prideaux's research, published in the latest edition of international journal Geology, goes against a University of Melbourne study released earlier this year that maintained climate change was the culprit.

Melbourne palaeontologist Matt Cupper said his carbon-dating techniques showed the megafauna died out 10,000 years before the first inhabitants had crossed over from Asia.

Since excavations in the 1930s Australia scientists have argued over whether the weather wiped out the megafauna or whether humans did it with clubs and spears.