Five-metre-long lizards, kangaroos so large they ate leaves off the trees, and an elephant-sized plant-eater which was the largest marsupial that ever lived; South Australia's Eyre Peninsula was home to very different animals between 120,000 and 40,000 years ago.
There were giant echidnas, giant Tasmanian devils, and even a flightless bird which weighed 250 kilograms.
A team of palaeontologists from Flinders University has been studying skeletal fossils at sites near Coffin Bay and Elliston on the Peninsula's west coast for nearly a decade.
Lead researcher, Aaron Camens, said the fossils and footprints they found provided a clearer picture of what might have roamed the region in the Late Pleistocene period.
"Eyre Peninsula's actually experienced one of the highest rates of mammal extinction anywhere in the world, there are very few native mammals left today, but there used to be a huge range of megafauna," Dr Camens said.
"In terms of what the fossil record tells us, there were giant short-faced kangaroos and a range of different marsupial carnivores, including thylacines, Tasmanian devils, and the marsupial lion.
"We even have footprints of Genyornis, a giant flightless bird that weighed about 250kg, they're some of the only confirmed records of those footprints anywhere in the country."
The sites have also turned up rare findings including a unique breed of short-faced kangaroo.
"The specimen that the whole species is named after comes from the Coffin Bay site," Dr Camens said.
Some mysteries remain unsolved
Megafauna disappeared from Australia roughly 40,000 years ago, but the exact age of the Eyre Peninsula sites remains a mystery.
Work on the sites has been put on hold due to COVID-19, but Dr Camens is still hoping to continue site work across the region.
"We're still looking at dating the fossil sites, to know exactly when those deposits were laid down," he said.
"There are relatively few people who work on the various dating techniques, many of them have a big backlog of sites that they're trying to work through."
Dr Camens also has a request for anyone who is wandering the coast while on holidays.
"If you're on the coast and you find something; a bone, a footprint in the sandstone, I'm always happy to hear from you if you find something," he said.
