The World Used to Be Full of Giants. Where Did They Go?

Giant animals like mammoths, giant ground sloths and Paraceratherium, a hornless rhino relative as tall as a double-decker bus, once lived on every continent. Why did big win for millions of years, and where did the giants go? In this video: for tens of millions of years, getting bigger paid off, a pattern called Cope's rule. Then, in the last 125,000 years or so, the biggest mammals vanished on one continent after another, while Africa kept most of its giants. We count the losses continent by continent, ask whether people or climate did it, look at the mammoths that outlived the mainland ones on Wrangel Island, and ask what an elephant really is today. Chapters: 00:00 Intro: an animal as tall as a bus 00:28 Why being big wins: Cope's rule 01:05 A world full of giants 01:33 The numbers: what each continent lost 02:25 The pattern: Africa vs everyone else 03:01 Was it people? 03:41 Or was it climate? 04:31 The price of being big 05:09 What we lost with the giants 05:33 The elephant is what's left Sources & method: the video relies on a global analysis of mammal body size over the late Quaternary and a country-by-country study of megafauna extinctions, plus reconstructions of Paraceratherium and the standard account of Cope's rule. Numbers for the largest animals are upper bounds from the biggest specimens, not averages, and the continent-by-continent counts come from a published overview table, not a census. The balance between human hunting and climate change is still debated. Smith et al. 2018, Body size downgrading of mammals over the late Quaternary, Science: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao5987 Sandom et al. 2014, Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.3254 Subtitles in English and Russian are available in the captions menu. If you enjoy stories about how people lived before modern comforts, subscribe to B.C. — Before Comfort. #Megafauna #Mammoth #Extinction