Dietary breadth in kangaroos facilitated resilience to Quaternary climatic variations.

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.

The demise of the giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki.

The largest ever primate and one of the largest of the southeast Asian megafauna, Gigantopithecus blacki, persisted in China from about 2.0 million years until the late middle Pleistocene when it became extinct. Its demise is enigmatic considering that it was one of the few Asian great apes to go extinct in the last 2.

Timing and dynamics of Late Pleistocene mammal extinctions in southwestern Australia.

Explaining the Late Pleistocene demise of many of the world's larger terrestrial vertebrates is arguably the most enduring and debated topic in Quaternary science. Australia lost >90% of its larger species by around 40 thousand years (ka) ago, but the relative importance of human impacts and increased aridity remains unclear. Resolving the debate has been hampered by a lack of sites spanning the last glacial cycle.