The beauty of the age we live in is the world's scientific elite can collaborate from the antipodes without leaving their own labs.
It also means research investigating how a 600-kilogram, six-metre long goanna would have fared when the earliest people arrived in Australia 60,000 years ago, is possible. 
Though not the main focus of the study, How to Build Your Dragon, the imagery evoked by an epic battle of man versus beast was too much to ignore.
The study focused on how animals, as they became larger, coped with the stress from the extra weight and how they moved.
It was completed when University of the Sunshine Coast Animal Ecophysiology lecturer Christofer Clemente partnered with Canadian scientist Simon Fraser, and focused on lizards.
Dr Clemente said the study was essentially about what happens when animals get really big.
"Being big makes a lot of sense. You want to be big because when you're big you don't get eaten by things and you can eat a lot more things," Dr Clemente said.
"Being big is a great idea. Unfortunately when you are big you have to support all the extra mass, so now you've got problems getting around."
Dr Clemente said as lizards get bigger their posture and shape doesn't really change and in Australia and Asia the monitor family could range from eight grams to 50 kilograms.
"So you have all this change in size in the same group and they don't really change their shape, so the question that we tried to ask is what happens, how do they support the mass as they get bigger."
A muscle has two roles, it can propel you forward and it supports the mass the body holds.
The trouble with getting bigger is that the role of the muscle in moving forward is compromised by its dual role of supporting weight.
"Lizards as they keep getting bigger, they won't get faster they will actually slow down at some point."
That point is around two to six kilograms where they are the fastest - above that they start to get sluggish.
About 100,000 years ago in the pleistocene there was a giant lizard lumbering around with an average weight of 250 kilograms and a maximum of 600 kilograms.
It would have been in Australia about the same time as Indigenous Australians arrived on the continent, and there is some evidence suggesting there was an overlap.
"The question then was who would have won, who was the top predator? Was it the giant meat-eating lizard or was it the human?
"Humans would have almost certainly been able to outrun this large lizard and they probably would have seen it as this slow lumbering lizard that would have made a delicious meal."
With the hunting by early Australians and climate change, the giant lizard's demise came soon after the arrival of humans.
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