discusses his personal life publicly. He met his first wife Paula Kendall while at La Trobe in the 1970s. Flannery and Kendall's house south of Sydney was destroyed in a bushfire in 1994. He has two children with Kendall; the couple separated in 1996. He owns a house with a solar hot water system at Coba Point on the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney, accessible only by boat; after this living location was revealed by broadcaster Ray Hadley he received threats and was given police protection. His second wife is anthropologist Alexandra Szalay. He has a third child with his partner Kate Holder. He moved to Victoria to be with her in 2014. In addition to writing non-fiction, he has also written unpublished works of fiction. He has described himself as a non-political person, and a humanist, rather than atheist. Scientific contributions Palaeontology In 1980, Flannery discovered an Allosaurid dinosaur fossil on the southern coast of Victoria, the first from the family known from Australia. In 1985, he had a role in the ground-breaking discovery of Cretaceous fossil monotreme Steropodon, the first Mesozoic mammal fossil discovered in Australia. This find extended the Australian mammal fossil record back 80 million years. During the 1980s, Flannery described most of the known Pleistocene megafaunal species in New Guinea as well as the fossil record of the phalangerids, a family of possums. As part of his doctoral studies, he reviewed the evolution of Macropodidae and described 29 new fossil species, including 11 new genera and three new subfamilies. Mammalogy Through the 1990s, Flannery surveyed the mammals of Melanesia—identifying more than 30 species—and took a leading role in conservation efforts in the region. He also identified at least 17 previously undescribed species during his 15 trips, includes the Dingiso, Sir David's long-beaked echidna and the Telefomin cuscus. He also found living specimens of the Bulmer's fruit bat, which were previous thought extinct. In the 1990s, Flannery published The Mammals of New Guinea (Cornell Press) and Prehistoric Mammals of Australia and New Guinea (Johns Hopkins Press), the most comprehensive reference works on the subjects. The specific name of the greater monkey-faced bat (Pteralopex flanneryi), described in 2005, honours Flannery. Flannery's work prompted Sir David Attenborough to describe him as being "in the league of the all-time great explorers like Dr David Livingstone". In 2022, Flannery was a co-author on new research on the origins of monotremes.