%0 Journal Article
%A White, Lauren C.
%A Saltré, Frédérik
%A Bradshaw, Corey J. A.
%A Austin, Jeremy J.
%+ Department of Primatology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society
%T High-quality fossil dates support a synchronous, Late Holocene extinction of devils and thylacines in mainland Australia : 
%G eng
%U https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0000-7E8C-6
%R 10.1098/rsbl.2017.0642
%7 2018-01-17
%D 2018
%* Review method: peer-reviewed
%X The last large marsupial carnivores—the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilis harrisii) and thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus)—went extinct on mainland Australia during the mid-Holocene. Based on the youngest fossil dates (approx. 3500 years before present, BP), these extinctions are often considered synchronous and driven by a common cause. However, many published devil dates have recently been rejected as unreliable, shifting the youngest mainland fossil age to 25 500 years BP and challenging the synchronous-extinction hypothesis. Here we provide 24 and 20 new ages for devils and thylacines, respectively, and collate existing, reliable radiocarbon dates by quality-filtering available records. We use this new dataset to estimate an extinction time for both species by applying the Gaussian-resampled, inverse-weighted McInerney (GRIWM) method. Our new data and analysis definitively support the synchronous-extinction hypothesis, estimating that the mainland devil and thylacine extinctions occurred between 3179 and 3227 years BP.
%J Biology Letters
%V 14
%N 1
%]  20170642
%@ 1744-95611744-957X