What are some Pleistocene animals?
Pleistocene is the name of a geological epoch, which began approximately 1,808,000 years and ended 11,550 years ago. The most geologically most important aspect of the Pleistocene is that it was the continuation of the cooling period, which began a few tens of millions of years ago and continues to this day.
Throughout the Pleistocene there were numerous icy ages, with ice leaves covering a large part of Eurasia and North America. The glaciers spread to the south like Hamburg, Germany, London, England and Chicago in the United States. Bering straight was passable for a long time, called Bering Land Bridge. This made it possible to mix the species of the old world and the kind of the new world, including the migration of people to America. Exceptions are, of course, what the topic is interesting.
Animals unique to the Pleistocene include cave bears (short -lived in the face of bears), mammoths and mastodones (related to modern elephants), saber cats with fangs as long as swords, wild terrible wolves, huge land sloths and related to Armadillos ZVAnene Glyptodons, which were the size of the Volkswagon Beetle. Many of them have been preserved by the La Brea tar pit in Los Angeles and hundreds of other fossil places around the world.
In South America and Australia, no -flying birds were larger than men, such as phorusrhacos, sometimes called "terrorist birds". In Australia there were also carnivorous kangaroos, giant wombati such as Diprotodon, Marsuipial Lion and massive snakes and lizards. The giant lizard, Megalanie, would easily be able to kill sheep and it is the closest thing of the dragon he has seen on Earth from the age of dinosaurs.
Generally, adaptive conditions of Pleistocene preferred size, which allowed animals to better bite body heat. Therefore, these large organisms were dubbed with pleanocene megafauna.
Other important Pleistocene animals are early homonides such as the genus Parranthropus and the predecessors of humanity or relatives homo habilis , homo floreSiensis , homo neanderthalis homos . homo Floresiensis and Homo Neanderthalis last extinct, with signs of former existing 12,000 years ago.
Most of the Pleistocene Megafauna was extinct between 20,000 and 10,000 years. This is very likely to be attributed to human hunting, the theory known as Overkill. There are various evidence, such as the fact that the megafauna in North America disappeared only when our ancestors crossed Bering Land Bridge. Another theory accuses the so -called Hyperdiseas, a terrible disease that has affected many different species, although it has less support than excessive theory.