New Fossils Show Tasmanian Devils Lived With People in Outback Western Australia 45,000 Years Ago

Tasmanian devils are among Australia’s most distinctive mammals. Stocky, powerful and famously noisy, wild populations are now restricted to Tasmania.

But this was not always the case. In fact, thousands of years ago devils could be found across mainland Australia.

Skeletal remains of Tasmanian devils have been found in deposits from southern Australia to the tropical north, across the Nullarbor, central Australia, Queensland, the Northern Territory and parts of southern Western Australia. Yet one major region was missing from this record: Western Australia’s Pilbara region.

Our new study, published in Archaeology in Oceania, reports the first unequivocal evidence of Tasmanian devils from the Pilbara, recovered from the Juukan 2 rock shelter on Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura Country.

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