A bit of shading and texture.
Ah, yes. (GASPS)
That's it. I've done it!
I'm a genius. (THUNDER RUMBLES)
I've created the perfect monster.
(CACKLES)
All I need is a wombat -
a harmless, little, cute little wombat.
Well, it won't be so harmless when I double...
No, no, triple, quadruple...
I'll make it the size of a truck!
(CACKLES)
I'll call it:
(THUNDER RUMBLES)
Um, sir? What?
Um, megafauna already is a thing.
What? Well, it-it WAS a thing.
Um, about, um, 40,000 years or so ago,
um, giant wombats called diprotodons used to actually roam the Earth.
What about a giant kangaroo? Um, giant macropus.
A large lizard? Megalania.
A bigger-than-average crocodile? Pallimnarchus.
Oh, I see.
JACK: This, um, scientist assistant is right.
Megafauna are a thing,
and Australia used to be mega full of them.
If you haven't worked out by the name yet,
megafauna were big.
We're talking kangaroos twice the height of an adult human...
..wombats that weighed two and a half tonnes...
..six-metre-long lizards...
..and massive crocs that you'd definitely want to avoid.
They're the sorts of creatures that palaeontologist Dr Scott Hocknull
has spent the past 10 years studying.
He and his team have uncovered a bunch of megafauna fossils
at South Walker Creek in northern Queensland,
including some species that have never been seen before.
And with the help of 3D scanning,
they've been able to piece together images
of what the huge beasts might have looked like.
Started with the first discoveries in 2008,
of these bones from ancient crocodiles,
and over that period of time,
we've uncovered an amazing array of 16 megafauna species.
This entire environment was dominated by mega-predators.
We have five species of gigantic reptiles -
three crocodiles, one that lived on land,
and two giant lizards, two giant goannas.
And there was even one predatory mammal
called thylacoleo - the marsupial lion.
So, you paint a picture of this very strange,
very different world
that the first Australians would have actually met.
Of course, these days, we don't have to worry about marsupial lions
and gigantic reptiles.
Actually, gigantic reptiles ARE still a thing,
but the kangaroos and wombats are far more modestly sized these days.
And that's because, around 40,000 years ago,
most of their distant mega-relatives became extinct.
How? Well, we're not quite sure.
For a long time, many people suspected
that it was because humans showed up and hunted them to extinction,
but more recently, experts have suggested
it might have been natural changes in the climate -
a theory Dr Scott says is backed up by his find.
Some time after 40,000 years ago, these animals went extinct,
and during this period of time
was a massive change in the environment -
the rivers dried up, the grasslands disappeared,
fire became more frequent in the landscape,
and, of course, people arrived.
But we don't have any evidence of people in our fossil sites,
so we can't place humans at the time of their extinction.
So, there you have it - humans are off the hook.
Well, maybe.
In any case, the find has given us some new insight into the amazing
and, well, slightly terrifying world of megafauna.
A world that I plan on restoring when I bring back the megafauna!
(CACKLES)
I just, um, need to find a wombat.
Um, does anybody have a wombat?