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.