The living Komodo dragon and illustration showing how the osteoderm bone reinforces the scales and acts like body armor. (Photo : Bryan Fry/Gilbert Price/University of Queensland)
Scientists have recovered the first evidence that prehistoric humans in Australia apparently had to face giant killer lizards in the last Ice Age.
According to palaeoecologist Gilbert Price from the University of Queensland, his team was fascinated when they discovered that the early human inhabitants in Australia and giant apex predator lizards apparently existed during the same time.
Price reveals that they found evidence from a tiny fossil from a prehistoric giant lizard from a two feet deep excavation site in Capricorn Caves near Rockhampton which is a fossil rich site filled with millions of bones from thousands of prehistoric creatures.
This tiny bone only measures one centimeter and is called the osteoderm that originates from under the skin of the lizard and is also considered to be the oldest record of giant lizard found in the entire continent.
With the use of radiocarbon and uranium thorium techniques, researchers were able to obtain the date of the bone, resulting to 50,000 years old that also suggests large lizards coexisted with the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia.
Price adds that it still undetermined whether the bone comes from a Komodo dragon which roamed Australia before or it could also be a larger species such as the Megalania monitor lizard that weighs about 500 kilograms and measures up to six meters long. Today, the largest living lizard in Australia is the perentie which can grow up to two meters.
In the last Ice Age, massive lizards and inland crocodiles measuring up to nine meters long once roamed Australia during the Pleistocene epoch, according to researchers. Price also adds that it has been debated whether humans or climate change caused these giant lizards to become extinct including most of the megafauna.
The new study is published in the journal, Quaternary Science Reviews.
