Giant Animals Known as Megafauna Once Roamed the Earth

And recently researchers discovered giant penguins and kangaroos were among them

Hiya!

Have you seen the movie the Princess Bride? There’s a scene when Princess Buttercup and Westley (aka the man in black, aka Dread Captian Roberts) run into the Fire Swamp to escape Humperdinck only to have close encounters with R.O.U.S’ — or rodents of unusual size — which include giant rats.

If you haven’t seen it, well, you should. Anyway, some recent discoveries remind me of the scene, except it’s penguins and kangaroos instead of rodents of unusual size. It turns out they aren’t an anomaly, either! We coexist with some larger animals these days, but thousands and millions of years ago, there were far more of them walking the Earth — and they’re called Megafauna.

Megafauna

During the Pleistocene epoch, beginning 2.5 million ago and ending 11,700 years ago, giant animals known as Megafauna roamed the Earth. Think elephants, rhinoceros, or the Australian diprotodon — except there were also giant ground sloths, cave bears, and saber-toothed tigers back then.

These days, the Megafauna living across the continent of Africa and some in Australia including the red kangaroo, emu, elephants, giraffes, and hippopotamuses are pretty much all that remains of these massive animals.

However, megafauna existed practically everywhere, especially in Australia and Papua New Guinea, until most of them went extinct. There are many possible reasons for their mass extinctions, but environmental factors are assumed to be the primary culprit.

Experts theorize that megafauna initially existed due to the glacial conditions of the last ice age, which began about 110,000 years ago and ended around 12,500 years ago. Then as the climate warmed and the ice age ended, most megafauna couldn’t handle the transition and went extinct.

The megafauna of New Guinea is considerably less studied than those of Africa or Australia, making the small country ripe with archeological mystery. This is only made more true with a recent discovery, about an older discovery, involving a new species of kangaroo.