Emu Bay on South Australia's Kangaroo Island has a beautiful beach, a jetty, kangaroos and a population of little penguins, but what it doesn't have is emus.
At different times in the past Kangaroo Island has had native dwarf Kangaroo Island emus and an imported population of mainland emus but both died out.
Kangaroo Island's dwarf emus were first documented by French explorer Nicholas Baudin, who landed on the island in 1803 with naturalist Francois Peron and more than 20 other scientists.
They had already discovered and collected live specimens of dwarf emus found on King Island and Tasmania.
Rapid extinction
Jeremy Austin from the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA says what followed was a rapid extinction of the Kangaroo Island emus. All of them were wiped out by the 1830s.
Professor Austin said the speed at which the species disappeared, once the early explorers landed on the island and it began to be used by sealers, suggested the emus were hunted in large numbers and that the original population might not have been extensive.
"If you think about the habitat on Kangaroo Island before Europeans turned up it was probably quite dense coastal scrub, which isn't fantastic habitat for emus.
"So maybe the population was quite small and restricted to smaller areas of open grassland."
Faster evolution on islands
Professor Austin said that at the time of Baudin's 1803 visit the animals on Kangaroo Island had been isolated from the mainland and humans for at least 10,000 years.
The Kangaroo Island and other islands' dwarf emus were genetically identical to the mainland species, he said.
"They may well have got across to Kangaroo Island just before the sea levels rose and then rapidly became small," he said.
"Animals and plants that get onto islands tend to evolve a lot faster than their mainland counterparts.
"So we see divergence in shape and size and colour and behaviour on islands much more rapidly than we tend to see on the mainland.
"Big things get small and small things get big, so islands are famous for having giant lizards and giant insects but they're also famous for having dwarf things.
"So, dwarf emus, tiny rhinoceroses and tiny elephants, like you get on islands in South-East Asia and the Mediterranean."
Unique area 'messed up'
Professor Austin said records of fossils found on the island at the Kelly Hill Caves showed the fauna on Kangaroo Island 4,000 to 5,000 years ago was very different from that on the modern-day island and included Tasmanian tigers, Tasmanian devils and quolls.
"It was one of those unique areas of Australia that didn't have a recent Indigenous history and so you've got vegetation and animals that are more or less untouched by humans for thousands of years — until Europeans turned up and made a total mess of it."
"I'm not sure that they realised just what they were looking at but certainly it was a very unique environment."
Emus taken to Paris
When Baudin and Peron left the island they added Kangaroo Island emus to their already large collection of live kangaroos, wombats, birds and tortoises.
Matthew Fielding from the University of Tasmania said two of the dwarf emus survived the journey to France and lived out their days at the home of Napoleon Bonaparte and Empress Josephine at Chateau de Malmaison in Paris before dying in 1822.
One was a King Island emu, the other a Kangaroo Island emu. The remains of both are held in European museums along with other emu bones and specimens taken back by Baudin.
The South Australia Museum holds 98 emu bones from Kangaroo Island and a model made by a staff member in the 1940s based on the remains, with feathers from mainland emus.
The bones are in the museum's science centre away from public view, and the model is in storage.
"It's so incredible and such an important part of history but I guess it's a certain level of preciousness as well when there are such little specimens available," Dr Fielding said.
"They're definitely not a distinct species from the mainland emu, that we all know, and there is a disagreement over whether they are a subspecies — which is kind of halfway between — or whether they're just isolated populations of that mainland species."
Island home for mainland emus
Almost 100 years after the original dwarf emus died out on Kangaroo Island, a population of mainland emus was introduced.
Those emus are still remembered by the island's residents.
Tour guide and wildlife photographer Nikki Redman remembers seeing them as a child in the 1970s and 1980s when visiting national park areas on the island.
"I remember you'd be sitting in the car eating and them sticking their heads in, grabbing sandwiches," she said.
The mainland emus are thought to have been introduced in the 1920s at the same time as a host of other animals not native to the island.
"The koalas, of course, were the main one and also the emu, kookaburras, a few different birds," Ms Redman said.
"Apparently [also] wombats, but I heard a story that they released two male wombats and of course that doesn't work.
"But I don't know whether that's just a tour guide story."
A spokesperson for the Kangaroo Island Landscape Board says the last of the mainland emus are believed to have died out in the late 1990s or early 2000s.