Megatherium Americanum (Giant Ground Sloth)

In terms of the Earth's  history, the Pleistocene Epoch (beginning 2.6 million - 11,000 years ago) was a particularly exciting period of development and change for mammals. The most recent Ice Age occurred, and within this time homo sapiens evolved to the beautiful beach babes that we are today. But most exciting of all was the rise and fall of the megafauna, giant beasts which roamed Australia and North and South America. Megafauna are classified as large or giant animals, and so elephants today fall under that category. (When they go extinct in about 5 minutes time, perhaps future generations will look at elephants in the same way that we look at megafauna of the Pleistocene epoch.)

 No Pleistocene megafauna has captured my imagination like Megatherium Americanum, the largest of the giant ground sloths that inhabited South America. There has been much debate on whether these beasts were omnivores, but what can be said with certainty is the 13 foot tall giants used their stature and massive claws to shred vegetation off of the plant life around them, much of which was unattainable to their short-arsed herbivore contemporaries. It's incredible to think that, despite weighing 4 tonnes, the megatherium were able to support that frame and walk on their hind legs. Still, I suspect many of us will manage a similar feat after the festive season has ended.

 What made the megatherium and other megafauna go extinct at the end of the Pleistocene epoch is hotly contested. The most popular theory points the finger at homo sapiens (again), as their global movements correlate with a rapid extinction of other species (again). In their excellent book 'Megafauna: Giant Beasts of Pleistocene South America', Farina, Vizcaino and De Juliis, cite evidence of a Lestodon sloth collarbone found in Uruguay with 87 human-made marks - chopping sawing, incisions and scraping. Whether this means that homo sapiens actively sought out and hunted megafauna, or whether the homo sapien nomads enjoyed an opportunistic find, it indicates an exciting period in our history where our ancestors shared a stage with these extinct beasts.

 Other theories come from a changing climate and extraterrestrial debris - that falling objects from space set areas of North America on fire and caused extreme climate disruption. This theory holds a lot of questions about our own sustainability, because it shows the devastating domino effect that occurs when food chains and ecosystems are disturbed.

                               

Anyway, more on Megafauna later - you won't believe the size of the Glyptodon armadillo!

Argentavis Magnifices

This website like is like being in a nightclub in Wigan, because we go from one big bird to another. The Argentavis Magnifices holds the honour of being the largest flying bird ever recorded (well, until we get some clearer facts about new kid on the block, Pelagornis sandersi) and lived during the relatively recent Miocene epoch 23 - 6 million years ago. These birds had wingspans of 23 feet and were master gliders through the air, but because of their size had difficulty in taking off to fly, and so much like a human hang glider would have to take off today, they ran downhill into wind blowing directly in front.

Argentavis lived in Argentina and probably enjoyed long lifespans of up to 100 years with no predators, most likely going extinct because of a changing, cooler climate at the end of the Miocene epoch.

The Argentavis is a member of an extinct group of massive birds of prey called Teratorns that lived between the Miocene and Pleistocene epochs. And whilst modern humans would never have had to have deal with a beast like Argentavis swooping around them and picking them up for dinner, they certainly would have had to have contended with another member of the Teratorn group, Aiolornis incredibilis, which had wingspans of 16 feet - smaller than Argentavis, but still huge. The closest animal we have to these today in terms of behaviour is the Californian Condor, which is the largest bird in North America, but has sadly been on an evolutionary life support machine since the 1980s.

  The Pleistocene epoch in which the Aiolornis incredibilis lived, is such an incredibly interesting period of time, because you get modern humans interacting and causing the extinction of certain megafauna - huge land mammals like the mammoth, giant ground sloths, saber-toothed cat and our friends in the Teratorn group. In fact, the cast list of the extinct megafauna of North and South America is so mind-blowing that I could spend the entire lifespan of this blog covering just that era, but for now I think the giant ground sloths need to be the next to have their moment in the sun purely because they were, quite frankly, ridiculous:

I mean, WHAT!

Gigantopithecus

 Setting the dial on our geological time travelling machine to a relatively recent period now, as we head back only 150,000 years ago to the Pleistocene epoch. In the dwindling bamboo forests of South Asia we might find our extinct homo-genus cousins, Homo Erectus (the oldest living of the homo- species) treading very carefully. That's because Homo Erectus had to share these forests with Giganthopithecus Blacki, the largest ape ever known. At nearly 10 feet tall, these bamboo-eating apes were King Kong before King Kong was even a thing.

My interest in Giganthopithecus was fuelled when I saw an artistic interpretation of what one of these apes might have looked like, and I was struck by the immediate resemblance to my ex-partner. Regardless, much of what we know about this 540 kg 'bigfoot' comes from teeth and jaws found in Vietnam, and the dental studies show that they lived on a diet of seeds, fruit and bamboo. What led to their extinction is likely to be a combination of climate change and a low reproductive rate, although there is also a strong possibility that Homo Erectus aggravated their demise, as shown in this aforementioned illustration: