GIANT wombat like creatures, flightless birds and Tasmanian devils and tigers roamed together around Kangaroo Island, a new fossil footprints site on a secluded beach has revealed.

Scientists from South Australia have discovered what they are calling one of the most diverse fossil trackways sites, from the late Pleistocine era, ever uncovered.

Flinders University lecturer in palaeontology Aaron Camens told the Sunday Mail the trackways are able to tell scientists things they would never know from just skeletal fossils alone.

media_camera A trace fossil site on Kangaroo Island revealed the wombat-like diprotodon.

“Australian fossil vertebrate trackways are extremely rare and this project was the first of its kind in Australia,” Dr Camens said.

“Footprints are better than bones because they show animals interacting.

“With footprints we have records of animals living in an environment together.

“We can also have footprints preserved in an environment where bones don’t preserve.

media_camera Adelaide Uni research fellow Dr Liz Reed excavating fossils in the Naracoorte cave. Picture: Steve Bourne.

Dr Camens is part of a team which has studied more than 6,500km of coastline from Victoria to Western Australia.

“We’ve got the so-called ‘Jurassic Park’ in Western Australia (where 21 different types of dinosaur tracks on a 25km stretch were discovered earlier this year) and other dinosaur footprints in Queensland, and now we’re discovering important Pleistocene vertebrate megafauna tracksites in southern Australia,” Dr Camens said.

“On Kangaroo Island, we discovered a trace fossil site preserving hundreds of individual traces made by several extinct animals including thylacines (or ‘Tassie tigers’), large quadrupeds (most probably diprotodontids), short-faced (sthenurine) kangaroos — along with possums, the Tasmanian devil, goannas, shorebirds and a variety of kangaroos.”

The discovery was made, on private land, on a secluded beach on the southern Dudley Peninsula.

“We spent two weeks on Kangaroo Island. This was the very last place we surveyed,” he said.

“This site can provide important information about the island’s prehistoric wildlife, its distribution and behaviour, to support and contrast with skeletal fossil discoveries.”

“In fact, the data collected during this six-year project will both to inform us of behavioural, anatomical and locomotory characteristics not preserved by skeletal fossils, and provide new palaeoecological information regarding the extinct Australian megafauna.”

“This gives us a view of which animals were coexisting in coastal ecosystems before the island became separated from the mainland, and before the disappearance of much of Australia’s megafauna.

“It also represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential trace fossil record has for informing us about the past distribution of Australia’s fascinating megafauna.

“Many more sites have been discovered along Australia’s southern coast and these will be published in the near future.”