A project undertaken at Griffith University, and supervised by Dr mark de Bruyn.
This project will seek to reconstruct whole Australian fossil ecosystems using widescale genetic investigations of the unique submerged Mt Gambier fossil deposits. In doing so, it will examine the role environmental change had on large Australian faunal extinctions. The underwater deposits of Mt Gambier fill a critical gap in cave palaeontology and preserve exquisite specimens of megafauna species including the rare Propleopus, a giant carnivorous kangaroo, the giant short-faced kangaroos Simosthenurus, and the marsupial ‘tapir’ Palorchestes, as well as cave sediments in conditions beneficial for the preservation of ancient DNA. There is ~95,000 years of critical information locked in the Mt Gambier caves, in the form of ancient environmental DNA, that can shed light on the dramatic biodiversity loss that occurred during the Pleistocene and the factors that drove this change. We are using genomic approaches to access this information through sequencing of DNA from macro-fossils, sediment, and water.