Extinct Ancestors of Modern Animals

[Spalea]

" Medium and large mammals (5 kg or more) of Miami, Florida 15-10,800 years ago!

Artwork by Gabriel N. Ugueto

Some of these massive beasts are familiar in form but enormous in size, while others are strange hybrids of modern-day animals.
Megafauna are simply big animals. Elephants are megafauna, as are giraffes, whales, cows, deer, tigers, and even humans. Megafauna can be found on every continent and in every country.
For every living species of megafauna, there are a large number of extinct megafauna. In the age before widespread settlement, without the pressures of human interference, animals were free to evolve into some truly awe-inspiring forms. Imagine beavers the size of bears or wild pigs larger than modern-day rhinoceroses, or even sloths as large as elephants.
Humans can be blamed for pushing many of the most recently extinct megafauna to their limits. It's generally agreed that the populations of many large animals plummeted in the first thousand years or so after humans hit a continent. Our earliest ancestors would, quite reasonably, have gone after the biggest animals they could to feed their families and kill the biggest predators to cut down on competition and attacks. Mix in human ingenuity, climatic changes, and hundreds and thousands of years and you soon get a land denuded of megafauna. "

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