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admiralturtleship t1_j9h2itn wrote

I just want to add that “megafauna” are not some long forgotten group of beasts that lived one JILLION years ago.

Megafauna still exist. In addition to blue whales, there are also less obvious examples like the moose.

Megafauna were common as recently as ~15,000 years ago, but saw a sudden decline due to a warming climate and human predation.

Your ancestors coexisted with megafauna and did not consider them separate from other animals (as far as we know). Many (not all) of the extinct megafauna are literally just bigger versions of things we have now. On the flip side, many of the animals we have now are the smaller version of the animals they coexisted with.

For example: beavers. Prior to the arrival of humans in the Americas, there was a giant species of beaver that was able to construct much larger dams than the beavers that we have left. The beavers we have now are like “miniature” versions of those beavers.

The small beavers almost went extinct, too. No different than their larger cousins.

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PeachSnappleOhYeah t1_j9hh0ob wrote

i just wanted to thank you and say your comment was extremely informative.

and also that coincidentally your mom's beaver is megafauna from a jillion years ago which is probably no different than her larger cousin's

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Ehboyo t1_j9hsq5w wrote

I pictured you adding this with a dramatic half turn, before exiting a large chamber. - footsteps echoing.

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Dirtroads2 t1_j9icu9u wrote

Suddenly I want to learn about these beavers....

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MarcusForrest t1_j9ma2e5 wrote

🖼️ Casteroides to scale

  • 2.2 m (7.2 feet) from tail to snout
  • 100 kg (220 lbs)
  • Teeth up to 15 cm (6 inches) long
  • Modern beavers have a major impact on forests due to their dams, imagine the impact the Casteroides left! How big their dams would be!
  • Could stay underwater for long periods of time thanks to its enlarged lungs
  • Interestingly enough, modern beaver brains are (proportionally) larger than Casteroides so it is theorized the ancient Casteroides had less complex thoughts and interacted with their environment a little less
  • They probably went extinct during the Pleistocene–Holocene Transition (12,800–11,500 years ago)
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brotherRozo t1_j9isdgp wrote

Yeah!! There’s around 150 megafauna alive today, and about the same number was killed off during the younger dryas ice-age events after 11000 bc

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Darknessie t1_j9io2vz wrote

Post10 is on the case of the giant beever, last spotted in the hoover dam area.

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BlueKnightBrownHorse t1_j9ihglo wrote

Mammoths were still around a few hundred years ago.

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MattyKatty t1_j9jfme2 wrote

Try thousands of years ago, and they weren’t really “around”, they were just on a few islands in low populations comparatively

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MarcusForrest t1_j9maa0t wrote

> few hundred years ago.

A few thousand years ago, (woolly mammoth extinct about 10 000 years ago) not hundred - off by a few magnitudes ahahaha

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