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

Lauren C. White, Frédérik Saltré, Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Jeremy J. Austin
Published 17 January 2018.DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0642
Lauren C. White
Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia 5005, AustraliaDepartment of Primatology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig 04103, Saxony, Germany
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  • For correspondence: lauren_white@eva.mpg.de
Frédérik Saltré
Global Ecology, College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Australia 5001, Australia
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Corey J. A. Bradshaw
Global Ecology, College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Australia 5001, Australia
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Jeremy J. Austin
Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia 5005, Australia
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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.

Footnotes

  • Electronic supplementary material is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.3965811.

  • Received October 14, 2017.
  • Accepted December 18, 2017.
  • © 2018 The Author(s)
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January 2018
Volume 14
, issue 1
Biology Letters: 14 (1)
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Keywords

extinction
AMS dating
thylacine
devil
Holocene
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High-quality fossil dates support a synchronous, Late Holocene extinction of devils and thylacines in mainland Australia
Lauren C. White, Frédérik Saltré, Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Jeremy J. Austin
Biol. Lett. 2018 14 20170642; DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0642. Published 17 January 2018
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Research article:

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

Lauren C. White, Frédérik Saltré, Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Jeremy J. Austin
Biol. Lett. 2018 14 20170642; DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0642. Published 17 January 2018

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