Prideaux Gavin J, Long John A, Ayliffe Linda K, Hellstrom John C, Pillans Brad, Boles Walter E, Hutchinson Mark N, Roberts Richard G, Cupper Matthew L, Arnold Lee J, Devine Paul D, Warburton Natalie M
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Western Australian Museum, Perth, Western Australia 6000, Australia.
Nature. 2007 Jan 25;445(7126):422-5. doi: 10.1038/nature05471.
How well the ecology, zoogeography and evolution of modern biotas is understood depends substantially on knowledge of the Pleistocene. Australia has one of the most distinctive, but least understood, Pleistocene faunas. Records from the western half of the continent are especially rare. Here we report on a diverse and exceptionally well preserved middle Pleistocene vertebrate assemblage from caves beneath the arid, treeless Nullarbor plain of south-central Australia. Many taxa are represented by whole skeletons, which together serve as a template for identifying fragmentary, hitherto indeterminate, remains collected previously from Pleistocene sites across southern Australia. A remarkable eight of the 23 Nullarbor kangaroos are new, including two tree-kangaroos. The diverse herbivore assemblage implies substantially greater floristic diversity than that of the modern shrub steppe, but all other faunal and stable-isotope data indicate that the climate was very similar to today. Because the 21 Nullarbor species that did not survive the Pleistocene were well adapted to dry conditions, climate change (specifically, increased aridity) is unlikely to have been significant in their extinction.
对现代生物群的生态、动物地理学和进化的理解程度在很大程度上取决于对更新世的了解。澳大利亚拥有最独特但也是了解最少的更新世动物群之一。该大陆西半部的记录尤为稀少。在此，我们报告了来自澳大利亚中南部干旱无树的纳拉伯平原之下洞穴中的一个多样且保存异常完好的中更新世脊椎动物组合。许多分类群由完整骨架代表，这些骨架共同构成了一个模板，用于识别此前从澳大利亚南部更新世遗址收集的零散、迄今无法确定的遗骸。在23种纳拉伯袋鼠中，有引人注目的8种是新物种，包括两种树袋鼠。多样的食草动物组合意味着当时的植物多样性远高于现代灌木草原，但所有其他动物群和稳定同位素数据表明，当时的气候与现在非常相似。由于21种在更新世未能存活下来的纳拉伯物种非常适应干旱条件，气候变化（特别是干旱加剧）在它们的灭绝过程中不太可能起到重要作用。
