English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

High-quality fossil dates support a synchronous, Late Holocene extinction of devils and thylacines in mainland Australia

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons214055

White,  Lauren C.       
Department of Primatology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

White, L. C., Saltré, F., Bradshaw, C. J. A., & Austin, J. J. (2018). High-quality fossil dates support a synchronous, Late Holocene extinction of devils and thylacines in mainland Australia. Biology Letters, 14(1): 20170642. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2017.0642.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0000-7E8C-6
Abstract
The last large marsupial carnivores—the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilis harrisii) and thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus)—went extinct on mainland Australia during the mid-Holocene. Based on the youngest fossil dates (approx. 3500 years before present, BP), these extinctions are often considered synchronous and driven by a common cause. However, many published devil dates have recently been rejected as unreliable, shifting the youngest mainland fossil age to 25 500 years BP and challenging the synchronous-extinction hypothesis. Here we provide 24 and 20 new ages for devils and thylacines, respectively, and collate existing, reliable radiocarbon dates by quality-filtering available records. We use this new dataset to estimate an extinction time for both species by applying the Gaussian-resampled, inverse-weighted McInerney (GRIWM) method. Our new data and analysis definitively support the synchronous-extinction hypothesis, estimating that the mainland devil and thylacine extinctions occurred between 3179 and 3227 years BP.