Life has been on Earth for 4 billion years, and some species have dominated Earth for hundreds of millions of years.
However, due to climate change, some animals have gradually withdrawn from the stage of history.
In this episode, we will take a look at the 4 major beasts that existed during the Ice Age, and they all coexisted with human ancestors.
Earth lazy
The ground sloth is a prehistoric megafauna that lived between 100,000 and 10,000 years ago, and is really about the size of an elephant, but its head is relatively small, and its body is covered with very rough long hairs.
The ground sloth has a long tongue and 5 buccal teeth on each side of the upper jaw, and they live mainly in South and Central America.
Ground sloths are slow to move, they generally walk on four legs, and their main food is the branches and leaves of trees.
About 8,000 years ago, the earth sloth went extinct along with many other large mammals in the Americas, and the cause of extinction remains a mystery today.
Saber-toothed tiger
Saber-toothed tigers are large cats that lived from the Miocene to the Pleistocene, and the saber-toothed tiger lived during the fourth season of the Ice Age, so the climate was very cold, and the saber-toothed tiger probably spent 3 million years with human ancestors.
Saber-toothed tigers are about the same size as modern tigers, but they have much larger upper canine teeth than modern tigers.
Some saber-toothed tigers even have upper canine teeth that exceed those of male wild boars, and the canine teeth of saber-toothed tigers are used to deal with large thick-skinned herbivores such as elephants, and the huge canine teeth can be quickly inserted deep into the flesh of the skin, and the wound is as large as possible, so that the prey bleeds heavily and dies quickly.
With climate change and the rise of other large carnivores, and the growing power of human ancestors, saber-toothed tigers have to face extinction.
Mammoth
Mammoths are the behemoths of the glacial century, they are very adapted to cold climates, mammoths have very stout limbs, long upper teeth, and curl upwards and outwards.
An adult mammoth can weigh 6 to 8 tons, has very fine long hairs, and its fat layer can reach 9 centimeters.
As a result, it is very cold tolerant, with mammoths feeding on grasses and legumes in summer and mammoths feeding on bark and shrubs in winter.
Mammoths have been extinct for less than 10,000 years, and fossil formations in nature take 25,000 years, so most mammoth fossils are semi-petrified.
Siberian unicorn
The Siberian unicorn, also known as the plate-toothed rhinoceros, is an extinct prehistoric rhinoceros.
Adult plate-toothed rhinoceros can weigh up to 4 tons, look a bit like a long hairy elephant, and feed mainly on grass.
The most recognizable feature of the plate-toothed rhinoceros is the huge single horn on its head, and scientists have conducted radioactive analysis of the remains of the plate-toothed rhinoceros and found that the plate-toothed rhinoceros once lived 36,000 years ago.
That is, they once coexisted with human ancestors for a long time.