Monash University An international research team led by Monash University has demonstrated that cooling temperatures and glacial cycles over the past 15 million years were essential for an explosion in terrestrial animal diversity throughout the Antarctic region. Often considered inhospitable, the Antarctic boasts surprising species diversity within many animal groups. Until now, this has been mostly reported for marine life, with a legacy of extinction the prevailing narrative for Antarctic terrestrial animals. Challenging this, the new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) uses cutting-edge genomic techniques to show that beetles on islands surrounding the Antarctic diversified in remarkable synchrony with the surrounding marine life, specifically as the climate cooled.