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. Using Dental Microwear Texture Analysis, we show that most members of Australia’s richest Pleistocene kangaroo assemblage had diets that were much more generalized than their craniodental anatomy implies. Mixed feeding across most kangaroos pinpoints dietary flexibility as a key behavioral adaptation to climate-driven fluctuations in vegetation structure, dispelling the likelihood that late Pleistocene climatic variation was the sole or primary driver of their disappearance., Modern samples
 
Modern specimens used in this study are housed in the Australian Museum, Sydney (prefix AM M); Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Alice Springs and Darwin (CAM, U); Museum Victoria, Melbourne (MV C, DTC); Flinders University Research Collection, Adelaide (FUR); Queensland Museum, Brisbane (QM A, J, JM), South Australian Museum, Adelaide (SAMA M); Western Australian Museum, Perth (WAM M); American Museum of Natural History, New York (AMNH); and Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery, Port Moresby (PNG MR). Sixteen extant species were sampled to capture a broad dietary spectrum, with an additional five species of *Dendrolagus *from New Guinea analyzed as a single unit, because no single species had adequate available samples (Table S1, Data S1).
 
Fossil samples
 
Paleontological specimens are housed in the South Australian Museum, Adelaide (SAMA P, FU). The sample originated from excavations of the Main Fossil Chamber deposit of Victoria Fossil C..., , # Dietary breadth in kangaroos facilitated resilience to Quaternary climatic variations

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4j0zpc8nf](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4j0zpc8nf)

The dataset includes two Excel (.xlsx) spreadsheets to accompany the manuscript, and seven *R* scripts to replicate the results.

#### File: S1\_data.xlsx

The Data S1 spreadsheet contains all of the data collected and more detailed results of the various analyses included in the manuscript. In all worksheets, significant (*p*<0.05) results are highlighted in yellow. The contents of each worksheet is:

| Worksheet | Description ...