Butchered giants and headless bodies - Pacific mystery exposed

Remains of giant horned turtles found at an even older human cemetery in Vanuatu have revealed that the first settlers shared a Pacific island with the turtles for at least two centuries. Researchers have also discovered that subsequent settlers killed, butchered and ate the turtles and dumped their bones on top of their predecessors' graves, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The study by palaeontologists Dr Arthur White and Dr Trevor Worthy, of the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and a team of archaeologists from The Australian National University led by Professor Matthew Spriggs of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology has unearthed fascinating details of the unusual turtle graveyard and bone bed. Fossils of the huge land-dwelling reptiles, known as meiolaniid turtles, are known from Australia and Argentina by rare remains often millions of years old, but are best known from Lord Howe Island where bones are many tens of thousands of years old. They were land-dwelling turtles with heads that featured multiple horns - and so could not be retracted beneath their massive armoured shells - and large knobby tails. The species found at Vanuatu is new to science. Its bones are also the most recent remains of this enigmatic family known.