Diprotodon, the largest marsupial ever

Move to Australia

The Diprotodon was the largest marsupial that ever lived. It along with many other members of a group of unusual species collectively called the Australian megafauna, existed from 1.6 million years ago until about 50,000 years ago (through most of the Pleistocene epoch). Diprotodon spp. fossils have been found in many places across Australia, including complete skulls & skeletons, as well as hair & foot impressions. More than one female skeleton has been found with a baby lying in her pouch.

It inhabited open forest, woodlands, & grasslands, possibly staying close to water, & eating leaves, shrubs & some grasses. The largest specimens were hippopotamus-sized: about three meters (10 feet long) from nose to tail, standing two meters (6 feet) tall at the shoulder. The closest surviving relatives are the wombats & the Koala. It is suggested that diprotodons may have been the inspiration for the legends of the bunyip: apparently, some Australian Aborigine tribes identify Diprotodon bones as those of "bunyips".

Theories on diprotodon extinction
Diprotodons, along with a wide range of other Australian megafauna, became extinct shortly after humans arrived in Australia about 50,000 years ago. Three theories have been advanced to explain the mass extinction.

Climate change
Australia has undergone a very long process of gradual aridification since it split off from Gondwanaland about 40 million years ago. From time to time the process reverses for a period, but overall the trend has been strongly toward lower rainfall. The recent ice ages produced no significant glaciation in mainland Australia but long periods of cold & very dry weather. It is suggested that lowered rainfall during the last ice age killed off all the large diprotodonts. Critics of this theory point out that the large diprotodonts had already survived a long series of similar ice ages & that there does not seem to be any particular reason why the most recent one should have achieved what all the previous ice ages had failed to do, & add that, in any case, the peak period of climate change appears to have been 25,000 years after the extinctions. Finally, critics point out that even during climatic extremes some parts of the continent always remain relatively exempt: the tropical north, for example, stays fairly warm & wet in all climatic circumstances; alpine valleys are less affected by drought, & so on.

Human hunting
The 'blitzkrieg' theory begins with the observation that the extinctions appear to have coincided with the arrival of human beings on the continent, just like when the first humans arrived in Europe, & North Americas. Some note that in broad, it was the largest & least well-defended species that died out, & argues that the obvious explanation is that human hunters killed & ate them—as happened with the megafauna of New Zealand & , at least in part, America—probably in the space of only a thousand years or so. Recent finds of Diprotodon bones which appear to display butchering marks lend support to this theory. Critics of this theory regard it as simplistic, arguing that (unlike New Zealand & America) there is little direct evidence of hunting, & that the dates on which the theory rests are too uncertain to be relied on.

Human land management
The third theory also places humans at centre stage, but as indirect rather than direct agents of change. It draws a link between the known land-management & hunting practices of modern Aboriginal people as recorded by the earliest European settlers before Aboriginal society was devastated by European contact & disease—regular & persistent burning off to drive game, open up dense thickets of vegetation, & create fresh green regrowth for both people & game animals to eat—and the sudden increase in ash deposits at the time that people first arrived in Australia. By changing the landscape with fire, this theory argues, the first human settlers destroyed the ecosystem on which large marsupial fauna depended.

Conclusion
These theories are not mutually exclusive. Although they are hotly & sometimes acrimoniously debated by specialists, few would argue that it is necessary to choose one single explanation for the extinction of many different animals in a wide range of different environments, from tropical to temperate, from desert to rainforest. Secondly, each of the three proposed mechanisms is broadly supportive of the other two, & often it makes little difference which one is regarded as the 'primary' cause. For example, if burning an area of fairly thick forest & thus turning it into a more open, grassy environment is considered likely to impact on the viability of a large browser (an animal that eats leaves & shoots rather than grasses), the reverse is equally true: removing the browsing animals (by eating them, or by any other means) within a few years produces a very thick undergrowth which, when a fire eventually starts through natural causes (as fires tend to do every few hundred years), burns with greater than usual ferocity. The burnt-out area is then repopulated with a greater proportion of fire-loving plant species (notably eucalypts, some acacias, & most of the native grasses) which are unsuitable habitat for most browsing animals. Either way, the trend is toward the modern Australian environment of highly flammable open sclerophyllous forests, woodlands & grasslands, none of which are suitable for large, slow-moving browsing animals—and either way, the changed microclimate produces substantially less rainfall.