A unique fossil was unearthed by a team of researchers from the University of Queensland Australia in an excavation inside one of the richest fossil-rich areas in Rockhampton, northeastern Australia, specifically in Capricorn Caves. The fossil uncovered was a skin bone, known as an Osteoderm and measured at 0.4 inch (one centimeter). The bone was excavated only 6.5 meters (two feet) deep from the soil, it marks the first evidence that huge apex-predator lizards and Australia's first settlers met in the same era.
"Our jaws drop, the find is pretty significant, especially for the time-frame that it dates," Gilbert Price, paleontologist in University of Queensland, said. Through carbon dating the researchers reached a conclusive age for the fossil, about 50,000 years old, the same time the first settlers in Australia happened to live. The continent has always been home to giant lizards and monstrous crocodiles that grew up to 26.5 feet during the last ice age. It has been long debated whether humans or the changes in weather were the reasons for the giant lizard's extinction.
Reasons as to how the giant killer lizards became extinct are still being studied further by Price and his team of researchers. What they do know is that humans are one of the potential drivers of the lizard's extinction. The team has many questions as to how the bone made its way into the cave as well.
The researchers are still looking for answers as to which animal did the fossil belong to, whether it be form the Komodo dragons that once thrived in Australia or to the Megalonia monitor lizard, which was said to have weigh over 500 kilograms and grew up to 20 meters in length. The biggest lizard in Australia today is the noted perentie, which can grow up to 6.5 feet in length. The perentie is only the fourth largest lizard in the world, just after the Komodo dragon, Asian water monitor and the crocodile monitor.
