if you think rhino's are impressive

Billy_T wrote:

And homo sapiens wiped them out. The bloodbath was incredible, all over the world. Yuval Harari’s book was an eye-opener for me. I didn’t realize how many animals our species made extinct. And this continues today.

Is it considered “genocide” when it’s not human slaughter, but slaughter of animals by humans?

Yes, pretty much whatever new lands Modern humans traveled to the megafauna there went extinct within a few hundred years. The African megafauna survived because they evolved alongside humans so they weren’t unprepared for them. Eurasia and the Americas had megafauna that rivaled Africa but they disappeared soon after the arrival of modern humans. It has happened too often to be coincidence.

wv wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

Amdrewsarchus is often described as wolf-like but it isn’t related to canids at all. It is actually a big nasty pig. It went extinct in the Eocene likely due to climate change and competition from smaller, faster predators called creodonts.

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Pig? Ok, then I’m off the Andrewsarchus bandwagon.

Weren’t there any mega-wolves?

w
v

There was the dire wolf which was about the same size as a grey wolf but had a really powerful bite.

Maybe the nastiest predator during the Pleistocene was the giant short-faced bear. It had long legs for a bear and likely could run as fast as a horse. It was about 5 to 6 ft tall at the shoulder when standing on all fours. It didn’t spend a lot of time rooting around for grubs and berries like most bears. It was strictly carnivorous and preyed on big animals. There’s speculation that the first small bands of humans to come across the Bering land bridge were probably wiped out by these bears and that humans couldn’t gain a foothold here until they came across in larger numbers due to the strength, size, speed and voracity of this bear. Just speculation though.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by nittany ram.