Essay by Eric Worrall

Another mystery case of megafauna disappearing shortly after the arrival of humans with sharp sticks.

Demise of Australia’s large kangaroos likely not caused by climate change, study suggests

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By Andrew Wulfeck
Published January 22, 2025 11:49pm EST

ADELAIDE, Australia – A new study has shed light on the extinction of many of Australia’s prehistoric kangaroos, challenging beliefs that their demise was closely linked to climate change.

In university research published in the journal Science, researchers said they used dental analysis to determine feeding habits, which turned out to differ from previous assumptions.

Wildlife biologists had assumed that climate change transformed ecosystems in ways the giant mammals couldn’t adapt to, but dental analysis now suggests these animals were actually able to adjust to the changing environment.

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“Our study shows that most prehistoric kangaroos at Naracoorte had broad diets. This dietary flexibility likely played a key role in their resilience during past changes in climate,” Dr. Samuel Arman, one of the lead researchers on the project, told staff at Flinders University in Australia.

So, what caused many of the continent’s large kangaroos to go extinct?

Researchers suggested the arrival of humans played a more significant role than previously thought more than 40,000 years ago.

Hunters primarily used the animals for their meat, with their skins turned into leather and other materials.

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Read more: https://www.foxweather.com/earth-space/australia-kangaroos-climate

The abstract of the study;

Dietary breadth in kangaroos facilitated resilience to Quaternary climatic variations

SAMUEL D. ARMAN, GRANT A. GULLY, AND GAVIN J. PRIDEAUX
SCIENCE
9 Jan 2025
Vol 387, Issue 6730
pp. 167-171

Editor’s summary

Much can be said about what a species ate based on the form of their teeth. In Australia, it has been hypothesized that the extinction of many large marsupial species by about 40,000 years ago may have been due to a narrow diet in the face of a changing climate. Arman et al. looked at extant and extinct kangaroo species using a tooth microwear approach and concluded that most species were generalists, not specialist grazers or browsers, and thus were adapted to deal with climate-driven vegetation changes. Thus, their demise was likely not driven by climate change, leaving humans as the probable cause. —Sacha Vignieri

Abstract

Identifying what drove the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions on the continents remains one of the most contested topics in historical science. This is especially so in Australia, which lost 90% of its large species by 40,000 years ago, more than half of them kangaroos. Determining causation has been obstructed by a poor understanding of their ecology. Using dental microwear texture analysis, we show that most members of Australia’s richest Pleistocene kangaroo assemblage had diets that were much more generalized than their craniodental anatomy implies. Mixed feeding across most kangaroos pinpoints dietary breadth as a key behavioral adaptation to climate-driven fluctuations in vegetation structure, dispelling the likelihood that late Pleistocene climatic variation was a primary driver of their disappearance.

Read more: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq4340

The varied diet argument seems pretty conclusive – an animal which could adapt its diet to changed conditions would be resilient to changes in conditions.

Reading the Wikipedia description, Procoptodon was likely slow moving compared to modern kangaroos, more of a lumberer than a hopper. Easy prey for early humans with sharp sticks.