Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
today: African lions have been living and breeding in outdoor enclo-
sures in Novosibirsk zoo in Siberia since the 1950s. Large animals
appear, in most parts of the world, to have been hunted to extinction by
people. These species have been excluded from temperate regions not
by any natural ecological or physiological constraints, but by humans.
With the possible exceptions of Australia's and Madagascar's, none of
these megafaunas has the capacity to amaze as much as that of the Amer-
icas. Alongside mammoths of several species (including one that dwarfed
the woolly variety), mastodons, four-tusked and spiral-tusked elephants,
lived an improbable bestiary of other massive herbivores. There was a
beaver (
Castoroides ohioensis
) the size of a black bear: eight feet from
nose to tail, with six-inch teeth. There was a giant bison (
Bison latifrons
)
whose bulls weighed two tonnes, stood eight feet at the shoulder and car-
ried horns seven feet across. Shrub oxen (
Euceratherium collinum
) and
musk oxen inhabited the entire northern continent. (Neither of them are
really oxen: they are closely related to sheep and goats, but very much
larger.) In South America there was a giant llama (
Macrauchenia
) whose
face ended in a trunk. There were armadillos - glyptodonts, such as
Glyptodon
and
Doedicurus
- the size of small cars, armoured with a
bony carapace like a tortoise's. Ground sloths - such as
Megatherium
and
Eremotherium
- the weight of elephants stood twenty feet on their
hind legs, and used their formidable claws to pull down trees.
The great American lion (
Panthera leo atrox
), one of the largest cats
ever to have existed, was almost sweet by comparison to the terrifying
Smilodon populator
- the giant sabretooth cat - which weighed as
much as a brown bear, hunted in packs and possessed fangs a foot
long. The short-faced bear (
Arctodus simus
) stood thirteen feet in its
hind socks; the Riverbluff Cave in Missouri has scratch marks made
by its claws fifteen feet from the floor.48
48
One hypothesis maintains
that its astonishing size and shocking armoury of teeth and claws are
the hallmarks of a specialist scavenger: it specialized in driving giant
lions and sabretooth cats off their prey.
49
The North American roc (
Aiolornis incredibilis)
, had a wingspan of
sixteen feet and a hooked bill the length of a man's foot. No skull of
another predatory bird, the Argentine roc (
Argentavis magnificens)
)
has yet been found, but the available bones suggest that its wings were
twenty-six feet across and that it weighed twelve stone.
50
On the
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