America Had More Giant Animals Than Africa: Every One We Lost | Full Documentary

Roughly fourteen thousand years ago, this continent held more giant animals than Africa does today. Dozens of species, from one ocean to the other, in almost every state. Beavers the size of a bear. Bears that reached eleven feet standing. Cats larger than any lion alive. Armadillos the size of a car. Sloths that weighed as much as an elephant. And elephants themselves, in enormous numbers, from Florida to Alaska. Almost all of them disappeared inside a window of about two thousand years. Not gradually, and not one at a time. In this full documentary we go through ten of them, one by one, starting with the smallest and finishing with the largest thing that ever walked on this ground. The giant beaver that could not build a dam. The dire wolf that was not closely related to any wolf alive. Two enormous cats hunting the same continent in completely different ways. A bear that left claw marks fifteen feet up a cave wall in Missouri. A seven-foot flightless bird in Florida. A ground sloth that fooled a future President into thinking he had found a giant predator. And the elephants that made this continent elephant country for two million years. 🎬 Explore more of Prehistoric America:    • America's Prehistoric Animals Documentaries   CHAPTERS 00:00 The Giants 01:08 The Beaver the Size of a Bear 07:28 The Wolf That Was Not a Wolf 13:48 Two Cats Larger Than Anything Alive 20:48 Eleven Feet Standing 27:48 The Ones That Look Like Nothing Alive 35:02 The Sloth as Heavy as an Elephant 42:29 Elephant Country 51:05 What Is Left SOURCES & FURTHER READING • Castoroides — body length and weight range, blunt ridged incisors unsuited to felling timber, absence of any associated dam or lodge structures, wetland dependence, Old Crow Basin and Great Lakes material • Dire wolf — Perri et al. 2021 genetic work establishing deep divergence from grey wolves and convergent similarity; La Brea representation of over four thousand individuals • Smilodon fatalis and Panthera atrox — body mass estimates, forelimb musculature, saber morphology, maneless reconstruction of the American lion, La Brea abundance and healed injuries • Arctodus simus — standing height, shoulder height, weight estimates, revised interpretation moving away from the fast pursuit predator model; Riverbluff Cave claw marks and bear beds • Titanis walleri and glyptodonts — Great American Interchange arrivals, Florida and Gulf material, seriema as closest living relative, fused shell structure and tail club function • Ground sloths — Eremotherium dimensions, Jefferson's 1797 Megalonyx paper and its public correction, dry cave preservation in Arizona and Nevada, Caribbean survival to roughly 4,400 years ago • Columbian mammoth, woolly mammoth and American mastodon — shoulder heights, tusk dimensions, the grinding versus conical tooth distinction and its dietary implications, Waco and Hot Springs sites • Late Pleistocene extinction — roughly thirty to forty large mammal species lost from North America, with the loss concentrated at the large end of every group #IceAge #Megafauna #PrehistoricAnimals #ExtinctAnimals #NorthAmerica