Ice Age Animals and Their Extinction

Smilodon, last of the sabre-toothed cats. Artist: Caroll.L. Fenton. Source and copyright: Patricia Vickers-Rich.

A range of giant mammals, birds and reptiles lived on Earth during the Pleistocene Epoch. These creatures included the woolly mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and giant deer in the Northern Hemisphere, and giant marsupials like Diprotodon in Australia.

The Pleistocene Epoch was characterised by a series of ice ages-the last peaking about 18,000 years ago. The large, extinct animals of this time are therefore termed Pleistocene or Ice age mammals. The term 'Megafauna' is also sometimes used, particularly for the giant marsupials that lived in Australia at this time.

Palaeontologists are very interested in the ice age mammals. Many of these creatures coexisted with humans towards the end of the Pleistocene, with the last of them becoming extinct less than one thousand years ago. The causes of their extinction is of considerable interest, with most palaeontologists suggesting that climatic fluctuations, human hunting, human habitat alteration or a combination of the three were responsible.

The part played by humans in the extinction of the megafauna is very unclear. Many researchers believe that the migration of humans into various parts of the world (such as North America) subjected the local megafauna to sudden hunting pressure, and so contributed to the extinction of many large animals. However, clear evidence of humans actually causing megafaunal extinctions is only present in Madagascar in the case of the giant lemurs, and in New Zealand in the case of the extinction of some of the moas (giant birds) about 500 years ago.