Holy Pleistocene, answer’s in bat cave

Let’s say you wanted to solve a 20,000-year-old mystery, where would you start? Perhaps archaeology and geology come to mind. Or, you could sift through a three-metre pile of bat faeces.

Researchers from James Cook University in Cairns chose the bat poo in their quest to answer to a long-standing question: why is there so much biodiversity on the islands of Sumatra, Borneo and Java, when not so long ago (geologically speaking) they were all part of one vast continent? Read more.