These 12 Dead Mammals Shocked Scientists

These 12 Dead Mammals Shocked Scientists

On earth, I must write soft into the fossils and patterns of bone, the history of strange evolutions and sensational deaths. Although dinosaurs like to steamroll through prehistoric competition, prehistoric mammal megafauna are at least as fascinating (if not more so) as dinosaurs. The discovery of the bones of these recently extinct species makes us change our books and draw a different picture of our recent past planet. Here are 12 incredible extinct mammals which happened to shock the scientific community with their discovery exactly.

Woolly Mammoth 

The Woolly Mammoth is probably the most recognisable of all of the Ice Age megafauna, the perfect steppeland mammal for this colder climat. This mastodon with its long curved tusks, its double layer of fat, and its Tomorrow thick mane of hair inhabited a world among early mankind. Its preservation in the frozen landscape of the Arctic and at times with soft tissue and blood intact has provided unprecedented insight into our Pleistocene taxonomic worlds in particular and has led to ongoing controversy over whether de-extinction is possible at all.

Irish Elk

Also known as the Deer crushing the trees, the giant Irish Elk had the widest set of antlers in the history of cervid as well as among the biggest of all living land mammals, reaching an astonishing 12 feet across. A solely evolutionary explanation for why the ant is dying off has been proposed: The antlers were becoming too large and therefore too heavy to transport, a so called evolutionary overkill, it says. Most of the scientists though have the opportunity that this giant mammal went extinct during the prehistoric times because it was driven by a combination of environmental fluctuation as well as human killing.

Saber-Toothed Cat 

Smilodon must surely have its place anywhere a list of the extinct reptiles (5) and mammals are placed. The sensationally long, serrated canine teeth of the piranha were not a generalized killing mechanism, but meant to enable the practice of the species' life saving, specific kills on larger, slower moving prey species that may have approached too close. The analysis of many specimens found at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles found evidence of possible social organization that included pack hunting, which is exceedingly rare with large cats today.

Glyptodon

At about a size that brought it into armored size territory, an ancestor of the armadillo traveled South America and wielded a missile like tail as a shield in self defense capabilities. Porites looks a lot like a dinosaur, and this was one of the biggest coincidences to horrify the first paleontologists.

Giant Ground Sloth

Another monster in South America was Megatherium, which weighed 4 tonnes and stood more than 12 feet high at shoulder height, on its hind legs. Unlike the slow moving and tree climbing crurotarsan cousins, these creatures were opportunistic omnivores that may have walked on their robust hind limbs to climb trees and strip leaves or to pilfer the meat that they may or may not find on rotting corpses.

Tasmanian Tiger

Just one of the recently lost animal species, the Thylacine was a marsupial trailing predator resembling a dog that only existed in the Australian island of Tasmania. Turned out to be a marsupial but by convergent evolution had a lot in common with a canid. And finally, the last member of the species passed away in 1936 in a Hobart zoo, but 59 days after it was declared a protected species, a bit more information from the world about preserving the species was spread.

Woolly Rhinoceros

The Woolly Rhino lived for quite some time alongside the Woolly Mammoth on the icy tundra of Eurasia and was well adapted to flourish in harsh temperatures. It had a dense wooly fur and huge flattened horns, which it would likely have used to clear the snow to get to the vegetation beneath. Even the mummies that have been beautifully uncovered in Siberia portray an animal that was a perfect invention to survive in an ice age that it died far too early.

Cave Lion

As it was bigger than the African lions of today and one of the most powerful predators, the Cave Lion was such a prominent predator that ancient human caused decorations were left in the caves of Europe. Those numbers, which feature manless men (apomorphoses), also reveal something of what they looked like that otherwise can't be demonstrated in the fossil record. Their death removed the top carnivore from the land and thus permanently altered the eco balance in the land.

Giant Beaver 

So we bid farewell to the beavers you have come to know well from dam building. Castoroides is another North American behemoth, and was over 8 feet tall and weighed close to 200 pounds. Although its teeth demonstrated that it ate aquatic plants, not wood, its discovery gave scientists reason to reconceptualize the Pleistocene wetlands as a habitat not of only large animals, but really giant rat rodents.

Steller Sea Cow

A close relative of the manatee and known as a Gentle sea giant because it could grow 30 feet long, it was found in the Bering Sea in 1741. It is a sad story, however, one of the fastest documented extinctions of marine mammals in known history. Sought after by sailors for its meat, fat, and hide, the entire species was hunted to extinction within a short 27 year period after Europeans first wrote their first observations in literature.

Aurochs 

The most ferocious of all domestic ruminants, the Auroxs was a massive and aggressive bovine that ranged Europe, Asia and North Africa. It was as large as a formidable opponent pounding its shoulder into the air, at nearly 6 feet in shoulder height and was considered a source of power in ancient cave paintings and stories. Their food source had been the wilderness, but the encroachment of the habitat and their handout by the over hunter had also been to the brink of their extinction in 1627, the same year that their descendants had become the origin for what we know today as a cow.

Baiji

The Baiji has been declared to be richly extinct in 2006 and is a modern day tragedy and a wake up call.  TOnce the most elegant and nearly blind of freshwater creatures, the river dolphin became extinct due to human pollution of the Yangtze in China, which had overtaken it with industrial waste and other unwanted human activity. boat traffic, habitat loss and fishing net traps. Its extinction is recorded as the first direct evidence of a marine mammal extinction by mankind

The Echo of their Footsteps

The life of these extinct mammals is not a palaeontology curiosity. They are warnings. Human hunting, in combination with habitat encroachment, was frequently the straw that broke the camel's back in cases of Ice Age megafauna. For the newly deceased animals, such as Thylacine and Baiji, the hand of humans can hardly be ignored.