What Scientists Found at Australia's Naracoorte Caves Has Shocked the Entire World

What Scientists Found at Australia's Naracoorte Caves Has Shocked the Entire World

In 1969, cave explorers in South Australia pushed through a narrow passage and found themselves standing in a vast chamber scattered with skulls and jaws belonging to animals unlike anything alive in Australia today. Giants that had fallen into the darkness and stayed there, undisturbed, for half a million years.

We're pretty much tracing the discovery of Naracoorte Caves, one of the richest fossil deposits on the planet and South Australia's only UNESCO World Heritage site, the marsupial lion Thylacoleo whose complete skeleton, tail included, took nearly 40 years and two separate discoveries to finally assemble, and the ongoing dig that's still adding new detail more than 50 years after it began. The chamber that changed everything is still being excavated today.

#australia #fossils #paleontology