 They are best known from the last surviving genus, "Meiolania", which lived in the rain forests of Australia from the Miocene until the Pleistocene, and insular species that lived on Lord Howe Island and New Caledonia during the Pleistocene and possibly the Holocene for the latter.A similar form is also known from the Miocene Saint Bathans Fauna of New Zealand.The family was once thought to have originated in Australia sometime in the Miocene, when the earliest "Meiolania" first appeared.