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000 years) are found throughout Australia, including on Flinders Island in Bass Strait.
    A fragment of a megafaunal devil jaw in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston is about 50 per cent larger than that of the extant species. It would no doubt have been a most efficient carrion eater because, like the present-day devil, it was designed to consume most parts of a carcass including bones.
    It is also possible that the giant devil was a hunter as well as a scavenger. Another such hunter was Megalania prisca (ancient giant butcher), an enormous hunting goanna five or more metres long:
    The large skull was equipped with numerous recurved, scimitar-like teeth . . . Like its modern counterparts, Megalania probably scavenged from dead animals, but would have also been able to hunt and kill quite large prey . . . It would also have competed for prey with other large carnivores such as the Marsupial Lion, Thylacoleo carnifex . 6
    There is considerable debate about this latter statement. For a long time it was believed that Megalania prisca , along with the huge terrestrial crocodile Quinkana fortirostrum and the giant snake Wonambi naracoortensis , were the dominant Ice Age land predators—consigning the mammals to a lesser, inferior role. But according to University of Sydney palaeontologist Dr Stephen Wroe, ‘the role of Australia’s fossil reptiles has been exaggerated, while that of our marsupial carnivores has been undersold. The image of an incongruous continent dominated by reptiles in the Age of Mammals has real curiosity value, but it is a castle in the air’7 Wroe’s assessment is based on an exhaustive re-examination of comparative weight and size estimates.
    Thylacine evidence reinforces the possibility of different-sized devils coexisting as well as occupying a range of predator–scavenger niches. Seven or so genera of extinct thylacine have been discovered, dating back at least 25 million years, in a range of sizes, from that of a quoll (4 kilograms) up to about 18 kilograms. While the larger species were true hunting carnivores, the smaller species were likely to have foraged for reptiles, small mammals and insects. The relationship between devil and thylacine is close enough to infer similar evolutionary traits in the challenging Australian environment.
    The demise of the megafauna was both swift and extensive: virtually everything in excess of about 40 kilograms became extinct. This meant more than 50 species. The carnivore family shrank arithmetically and literally, leaving only the devil, the quolls and a single thylacine species representing medium- to large-sized mammal predators. Indeed, all modern Australian marsupials are true survivors, reflecting ‘the considerable evolutionary fine-tuning that has allowed them to cope with the drastically altered climates and escalating environmental stress of the last five million years’. 8 But was there something other than smaller size that spared them from the fate of the megafauna? Climate change, human influence, or a combination of the two, have all been proposed as the agent of the antipodean mass extinction.
    Climate proponents argue that at the height of the most recent Ice Age, between 18 000 and 22 000 years ago, the Australian environment had become incapable of sustaining large herbivores. Their world shifted from being cold and dry to warm and dry; the bigger the animal, the less adaptable it was to rapid environmental change. Over a relatively short period of time, Australia’s preponderance of rainforest gave way to open woodland, then to savannah, then to desert. Food and water ran out for all but the smaller, more robust creatures, and for some reason there was a fairly specific cut-off body size.
    In the absence of irrefutable evidence, can the climate theory be tested? Modern Australia has long been under the influence of the so-called ENSO effect, being the combined influence of El Niño and the