It’s been just three days since Stephen Wore, Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, published his article Climate change wiped out Australia’s megafauna on popular commentary and debate website The Conversation.
Thylacoleo, commonly known as marsupial lions, was an Australian megafauna that lived 2 million to 46 thousand years ago.
Since 7 May, his article has been shared dozens of times on social media networks Twitter and Facebook. Why? His claim that climate change caused the extinction of megafauna goes against the common human-driven explanations.
“Across geological time the vast majority of species that have ever lived have gone extinct, and the vast majority of these in the complete absence of humans. Climate or climate-related influences are undoubtedly to blame in almost every instance,” wrote Wroe. It was his first contribution to The Conversation.
Megafauna survived longer on Tasmania, Australia’s largest island, than anywhere else.
Feature image credit: “Thylacoleo fossil” © 2009 avlxyz, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
