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Articles on Megafauna

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The fossil deposits at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles have well-preserved remains of many prehistoric animals that got stuck in natural asphalt seeps over the past 60,000 years. Cullen Townsend, courtesy of NHMLAC

A changing climate, growing human populations and widespread fires contributed to the last major extinction event − can we prevent another?

New findings from the La Brea Tar Pits in southern California suggest human-caused wildfires in the region, along with a warming climate, led to the loss of most of the area’s large mammals.
Animals that shared the landscape with humans disappeared as the ice age ended. Mauricio Antón/Wikimedia Commons

Forensic evidence suggests Paleo-Americans hunted mastodons, mammoths and other megafauna in eastern North America 13,000 years ago

A forensic technique more often used at modern crime scenes identified blood residue from large extinct animals on spearpoints and stone tools used by people who lived in the Carolinas millennia ago.
Ramsayia reconstruction (r) next to a modern wombat. Eleanor Pease

For the first time ever, we have a complete skull description of a true fossil giant wombat

80,000 years ago, Australia’s landscape was dominated by much larger versions of today’s marsupials – including enigmatic and enormous wombats.
Jaime Bran/Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

Scientists thought these seals evolved in the north. 3-million-year-old fossils from New Zealand suggest otherwise

This newly discovered ancient monk seal is challenging previous theories about how and where monachine seals evolved. It’s the biggest breakthrough in seal evolution research in about 70 years.

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