Australia's Lake Callabonna Has a Secret No One Can Explain

In eighteen ninety-two, an Aboriginal stockman named Jackie Nolan found bones embedded in the cracked surface of a dry salt lake in South Australia's far north. Bones larger than anything alive on the continent today. What followed was the discovery of the largest graveyard of prehistoric giants ever found in Australia. A joint Flinders University expedition in twenty twenty-four has now formally documented six hundred and forty-six megafaunal skeletons across twelve species at Lake Callabonna, including Diprotodon, the largest marsupial that has ever lived, Genyornis newtoni, a two hundred and forty kilogram flightless bird, and Thylacoleo carnifex, the marsupial lion, whose remains sit in the same graveyard as its prey. One Diprotodon was found with its stomach contents still intact. Undigested leaves and twigs from an animal's final meal, sealed in dried mud for more than fifty thousand years. Fossilised footprints show individuals struggling before they stopped moving. Radiocarbon analysis suggests some animals at this site may have survived twenty thousand years after Diprotodon is believed to have gone extinct everywhere else on the continent. Nobody has produced a fully accepted explanation for why this specific lake became such a consistent trap across thousands of years when other drying lakes in the same region produced nothing comparable.

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