Pitfall traps that kept a census of the megafauna for a million years
The largest known Pleistocene vertebrate fossil deposit in Australia, found in 1969, in caves that have been open at least 1.34 million years. The mechanism is grim and it is why the record is so good: these were pitfall traps. Animals walked over ground that gave way, fell into a chamber they could not climb out of, and died there, and soil washed in afterwards and buried them, layer on layer, some deposits 20 metres thick. The result is a continuous census of Australian megafauna across hundreds of thousands of years, the record the extinction argument turns on. Victoria Fossil Cave holds a skeleton of Thylacoleo carnifex, the marsupial lion. There is also a bat cave with cameras in it, so you can watch thousands of southern bent-wing bats breed in a chamber nobody is allowed to enter. UNESCO listed it in 1994 with Riversleigh; 26 caves in a 300 hectare World Heritage area. Limestone Coast, South Australia.
Limestone Coast, South Australia
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