>If the mastodon hadn't gone extinct, we could've had a species of North American elephant
Anyone else ever think about how many cool animals we've missed out on? I wish megafauana still existed
>If the mastodon hadn't gone extinct, we could've had a species of North American elephant
I always thought mastodon and mammoths were names for the same animal only to find out recently they're completely different species.
Wait until you find out what the Linnean name for the mastodon is.
Wait until you both find out that Mastodons are on a completely different line from Mammoths that goes WAY back to the dawn of elephants.
I'm not sure if it's Mandela or just the scientific consensus being changed but I remember gomphotheres being basal and mastodons being the sister lineage to elephants and mammoths.
They're both rather early. Not quite "basal" but much older than Elephantidae.
The last mammoths were around up until about 3800 years ago but confined to Wrangel island. This is recent enough for written accounts to exist but the area was unpopulated at the time. There was also the Columbian mammoth that lived as far south as Mexico and Texas but they too died out with the other megafauna.
Those native Americans ruined the world and hunted an animal into extinction. They should have thought more globally instead of so selfishly
>He thinks megafauna means giant animals
kek.
In all fairness, I was drunk when I made this thread
That is what it means
Actually if you think that it means what it should intuitively mean that makes you a moron. It really means whatever the science™ decides to classify™ as megafauna®
>the American west used to have cheetahs and lions and elephants and native zebra-like horses
>then it just had bison
>now it doesn't even have those either
humen hongry
>now it doesn't even have those either
It still has bison, but now it has cows, horses, and pigs
Frens 🙂
That's a huge pig
pronghorn, catamounts, moose, and brown bears don't make up for it totally, but it helps to know megafauna still exist here.
>catamount
just call it a puma/cougar like a normal person, moron
With its flat, long skull, it would've had a relatively small brain.
Checking Brain evolution in Proboscidea (Mammalia, Afrotheria) across the Cenozoic (Nature.com, classified as spam by Wauf for some reason), yeah, checks out. Significantly lower encephalisation than modern elephants as well as its mammoth contemporaries.
They'd be the elephants' moronic little cousins.
Brain volume doesn't correlate to intelligence.
t. brainlet
Density is more important than volume.
That's it? I thought mammoths were huge. You're saying they're the same size as an African elephant?
Forget it, not worth resurrecting. Not unless you boost the size about 20%
There are multiple species.
>Steppe Mammoth
Now we're talking
There were dwarf mammoths on an island in California
Wanna hear how much cope there is in the "debate" about humans wiping out the Pleistocene Megafauna? The Channel Islands Mammoth (M. exilis) lived on what are now the Channel Islands off the coast of California. It is known they went extinct after humans arrived on the island and their extinction is marked by massive fires on the island and evidence of humans butchering them for meat. The MAINSTREAM story is that the fires were mere coincidence and humans only butchered mammoths they already found dead. I FRICKING SHIT YOU NOT. This is the MAINSTREAM story accepted by academia.
Sounds like a pretty clear case of
>we know that it was the paleo-indians but saying that they hunted mammoths, rhinos, horses, etc. into extinction would make certain people butthurt and cause bad PR thus we pretend that it was just a coincidence
I'm about 100% positive this is why american soientists always lie about the cause of the Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions. Ironically, Australia is the only continent where humans destroying the environment has been accepted as truth. I'm pretty sure this is because ausfailia is full of shitty sadists and didn't give one red frick about the abbos before they descended into the woke spiral of the rest of the ~~*west*~~.
And of course the reason yuropoors claim they didn't do it is because they're arrogant fools who claim they never did anything wrong ever. It's all politics.
actually they blame australia on a specific species of hawk now, said hawk having a habit of intentionally starting bush fires to flush out prey.
What can a mastodon actually do though? If you hug its hind legs it can't reach you with its truck, and its too sluggish to get away while you repeatedly pommel it from behind. If you stand to the side of its hind legs then it won't even be able to hit you with a back kick. If it raises its leg to perform a stomp then all you have to do is back off until it finishes its slam, then move back in to continue punching.
>Punching an elephant to death.
Anon, chip damage doesn't exist IRL.
It's a pasta
it does, but you need a tool for that. and it would take really long and multiple tools.
>perform a stomp
Real animals don't have pre-scripted attack patterns
>Real animals don't have pre-scripted attack patterns
What are "ambush hunters"?
>tfw no giant ground sloths
Recent extinctions are the ones that really hurt though because I think about how close we are to still having them. Like the passenger pigeon, we could have flocks with hundreds of millions of birds filling the sky right now.
He does not know
Aside from few South American oddballs like giant sloths, armadillos and Toxodont, Pleistocene North America wildlife were more or less similiar to how African wildlife is today
Why do American animals always look so much fluffier then their non-american counterparts
because it was an ice age 20000 years ago, most of north america was frozen over
Moderns have no idea what the Earth is supposed to look like. It is only the "fluffy" species that are emphasized by the media. Most North American wildlife was temperate and the entire American tropics was tropical to temperate.
the world is in the tail end of an ice age moron, and mammoth fossils come from areas that are still pretty cold.
overconsumption of high fructose corn syrup