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February 7th, 2016 
Awake Goy The Genyornis eggs are thought to have been roughly the size of a cantaloupe and weighed about 3.5 pounds, Miller said.Genyornis roamed the Australian outback with an astonishing menagerie of other now-extinct megafauna that included a 1,000-pound kangaroo, a 2-ton wombat, a 25-foot-long-lizard, a 300-pound marsupial lion and a Volkswagen-sized tortoise. More than 85 percent of Australia’s mammals, birds and reptiles weighing over 100 pounds went extinct shortly after the arrival of the first humans.
Miller and others suspect Australia’s first inhabitants traveled to the northern coast of the continent on rafts launched from Indonesian islands several hundred miles away. “We will never know the exact time window humans arrived on the continent,” he said. “But there is reliable evidence they were widely dispersed across the continent before 47,000 years ago.”
Another line of evidence for early human predation on Genyornis eggs is the presence of ancient, burned eggshells of emus — flightless birds weighing only about 100 pounds and which still exist in Australia today — in the sand dunes. Emu eggshells exhibiting burn patterns similar to Genyornis eggshells first appear on the landscape about 50,000 years ago, signaling they most likely were scorched after humans arrived in Australia, and are found fairly consistently to modern times, Miller said.
More than 85 percent of the continent’s megafauna went extinct not long after humans arrived.
The reasons for these extinctions are hotly debated. Some scientists say humans are to blame, others credit climate change and some say it’s likely a mixture of both.
But the continental drying of Australia, from about 60,000 to 40,000 years ago, is likely not the main reason for these animals’ extinctions, Miller said. The rate and magnitude of this climate change was as severe as earlier climate shifts, but large megafauna extinctions did not accompany these earlier changes, he said.
“Ours is the first study to show with direct evidence that early humans in Australia also preyed on the now-extinct megafauna,” he told Live Science.
Source Article from http://worldtruth.tv/are-humans-to-blame-for-mysterious-extinction-of-500-pounds-flightless-birds-roughly-50000-years-ago/
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