Since the outset of the Quaternary, whales and sharks have ruled the seas, topping a food chain with otters, seals, dugongs, ...

The extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna may be people’s fault after all, according to a recent study. A team of archaeologists recently examined animal bones at sites dating to the waning years of ...

POCATELLO — About 13,000 years ago on the banks of the Pleistocene American Falls Lake on the Snake River Plain near Pocatello, large “megafauna” mammals now extinct — such as mammoths, mastodons, ...

Ten thousand years ago, the Americas teemed with mastodons, giant ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats. Within a few millennia, nearly all of them were gone. A study published in April 2025 in the ...

Today’s land animals are a bunch of runts compared with creatures from the not-too-distant past. Beasts as big as elephants, gorillas and bears were once much more common around the world. Then, ...

Scientists have unravelled a mystery about the disappearance of dwarf hippos and elephants that once roamed the picturesque landscape on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus before palaeolithic humans ...

The Mesolithic period began when the Ice Age ended and familiar patterns of survival collapsed. Large animals vanished, ...

Madagascar saw a relatively recent mass extinction event about 1,000 years ago, when gorilla-sized lemurs, towering elephant birds, and grand tortoises were all wiped out from the island. A recently ...

The extinction of threatened marine megafauna species could result in larger than expected losses in functional diversity, according to new research. In a paper published in Science Advances, an ...

Jabiru birds fly past a herd of Columbian Mammoths as they make their way across a river delta. A new study published in Nature Communications suggests that the extinction of North America's largest ...