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A team of scientists from Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia have disproved claims that the world’s largest lizard, the Komodo dragon, evolved in Indonesia.

New research by the team of palaeontologists and archaeologists, who studied fossil evidence from Australia, Timor, Flores, Java and India, shows that Komodo dragons most likely evolved in Australia and dispersed westward to Indonesia.

The research was published on Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE.

The carnivorous Komodo dragon is the largest living species of lizard in the world and is now only found on the Indonesian islands of Komodo, Rinca, Flores and Gili Motang. A member of the monitor lizard family, Komodo dragons kill prey with their sharp teeth and septic saliva and grow to an average length of two to three meters, weighing around 70 kilograms.

Author Scott Hocknull, Senior Curator of Geosciences at the Queensland Museum, said Australia is a hub for lizard evolution.

“The fossil record shows that over the last four million years Australia has been home to the world’s largest lizards, including a five meter giant called Megalania,” Mr Hocknull said in a press statement.

“Now we can say Australia was also the birthplace of the three-meter Komodo dragon, dispelling the long-held scientific hypothesis that it evolved from a smaller ancestor in isolation on the Indonesian islands,” he said.

Hocknull said that the research team had unearthed a number of fossils from eastern Australia dated from 300,000 years ago to approximately four million years ago that are now known to be Komodo dragons. The bones in the fossils were identical to the bones of present-day Komodo dragons, he said.

It was previously thought that the Komodo dragon evolved to its large size as a response to insular island processes, lack of carnivore competition or as a specialist hunter of pygmy elephants called Stegodon. However, Hocknull and his colleagues reported that the ancestor of the Komodo dragon most likely evolved in Australia and reached Flores around 900,000 years ago.

The researchers hope their findings will help the conservation of the Komodo dragon, which is considered vulnerable to extinction due to habitat loss and persecution by humans.

JG