New research led by a University of Alaska Fairbanks archaeologist reveals that the earliest Native Americans had highly specialized diets, primarily hunting the largest animals on the landscape, and ...

A long, long time ago, marsupials the size of small trucks, 2-meter-tall "thunder birds" and 5-meter-long venomous lizards roamed Australia. These animals—and more—were Australia's megafauna.

For decades, anthropologists have debated whether these early peoples subsisted by taking down the massive mammals of the time or foraged on a mix of whatever they could find. A recent study published ...

During the Late Pleistocene, a significant number of megafauna species, broadly defined as animals exceeding 44 kg, ...

Earth once hosted many massive creatures called megafauna; they are technically defined as animals with mature body weights that exceed 44 kilograms (97 pounds). Megaherbivores, on the other hand, are ...

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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, ...

Ancient clues, in the shape of fossils and archaeological evidence of varying quality scattered across Australia, have formed the basis of several hypotheses about the fate of megafauna that vanished ...

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 ...