Intrepid Science Blog

Australia’s epic story: a tale of amazing people, amazing creatures and rising seas We have so much more to learn about Australia. Shutterstock/Lev Savitskiy Michael Bird , James Cook University ; Alan Cooper , University of Adelaide ; Chris Turney , UNSW ; Darren Curnoe , UNSW ; Lynette Russell , Monash University , and Sean Ulm , James Cook University The Australian continent has a remarkable history — a story of isolation, desiccation and resilience on an ark at the edge of the world. It is a story of survival, ingenuity, and awe-inspiring achievements over many years. Shortly after the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, Australia was torn from the supercontinent of Gondwana by immense tectonic forces and began its long, lonely, journey north towards the equator . The lush temperate forests of Gondwana slowly disappeared as the Australian landmass pushed north, preserving a snapshot of faunal life from a much earlier evoluti...

How a change in climate wiped out the 'Siberian unicorn' An artist’s impression of Siberian unicorns ( Elasmotherium ) walking in the steppe grass on a cloudy day. Shutterstock/Elenarts Kieren Mitchell , University of Adelaide ; Adrian Lister , Natural History Museum ; Alan Cooper , University of Adelaide , and Chris Turney , UNSW A mysterious shaggy giant species of rhinoceros – named the Siberian unicorn due to its enormous single horn – turns out to have survived in western Russia until just 36,000 years ago, according to research published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution . This extinction date means that the Siberian unicorn’s final days were shared with early modern humans and Neanderthals. Previously, little was known about the creature thought to have become extinct more than 200,000 years ago. But genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating have begun to reveal many aspects of how it lived, and when it died out. A k...

At the end of the last ice age (11,000 to 18,000 years ago), the world suddenly lost some of the most remarkable creatures that ever roamed our planet. Patagonia in southern South America was particularly rich in creatures that could only be labelled bizarre today: elephant-sized sloths, giant jaguar, powerful sabre-toothed cats and an enormous one-tonne short-faced bear (the largest ever land-based mammalian carnivore). What caused their demise is  one of the big geological whodunnits.  Last year you may remember we had a research paper published in Science that looked at megafaunal extinction in North America and Eurasia . Whilst warming looked like it was a driver of the extinctions in the Northern Hemisphere, there was a tantalising hint that humans had also played a role. But disentangling the effects of both was challenging.  To test their roles we have extended our work to Patagonia and the results are now published in the The American Association for the Advan...