Detail from an illustration of Genyornis being chased from its nest by a Megalania lizard in prehistoric Australia. Credit: Peter Trusler
Phys.org has a story about the extinction of the large flightless birds in Australia. An international team of scientists have found evidence that the earliest humans to arrive on Australia ate the eggs of the large flightless birds that lived in Australia 47,000 years ago. That evidence suggests humans had direct influence on the extinction. The research was published in a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Proteins extracted from fragments of prehistoric eggshell found in the Australian sands confirm that the continent's earliest humans consumed the eggs of a two-meter tall bird that disappeared into extinction over 47,000 years ago.
Burn marks discovered on scraps of ancient shell several years ago suggested the first Australians cooked and ate large eggs from a long-extinct bird—leading to fierce debate over the species that laid them.
Now, an international team led by scientists from the universities of Cambridge and Turin have placed the animal on the evolutionary tree by comparing the protein sequences from powdered egg fossils to those encoded in the genomes of living avian species.
"Time, temperature and the chemistry of a fossil all dictate how much information we can glean," said senior co-author Prof Matthew Collins from the University of Cambridge's Department of Archaeology.
"Eggshells are made of mineral crystals that can tightly trap some proteins, preserving this biological data in the harshest of environments—potentially for millions of years."
