Dietary breadth in kangaroos facilitated resilience to Quaternary climatic variations

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Arman, Samuel D.; Gully, Grant A.; Prideaux, Gavin J.
• 署名单位: Flinders University South Australia
• 刊物名称: SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0036-8709
• DOI: 10.1126/science.adq4340
• 发表日期: 2025-01-10
• 页码: 167-171
• 关键词: microwear texture analysis; dental microwear; australian megafauna; extinction; macropodidae; responses

摘要

Identifying what drove the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions on the continents remains one of the most contested topics in historical science. This is especially so in Australia, which lost 90% of its large species by 40,000 years ago, more than half of them kangaroos. Determining causation has been obstructed by a poor understanding of their ecology. Using dental microwear texture analysis, we show that most members of Australia's richest Pleistocene kangaroo assemblage had diets that were much more generalized than their craniodental anatomy implies. Mixed feeding across most kangaroos pinpoints dietary breadth as a key behavioral adaptation to climate-driven fluctuations in vegetation structure, dispelling the likelihood that late Pleistocene climatic variation was a primary driver of their disappearance.