Ten of The Craziest Animals To Have Existed Since the Dinosaurs
Most people visit natural history museums with a fairly myopic mindset. Sure, sea slugs and coelacanths are cool, but let’s cut the BS — dinosaurs are the real show. I was this way too for most of my life. It was only after I went to grad school that I realized how much happened since the dinosaurs. Even quite recently, some truly otherworldly creatures existed. Here are a few:
1. Ancient Whales
In case you missed third-grade science class, whales aren’t fish — they’re mammals. This means that they breathe air and feed their young with milk. But it also means that they evolved from creatures on land.
If you have a hard time imagining what whales’ ancient ancestors might have looked like, you aren’t alone. Since fossils preserve terribly in shallow aquatic environments, few fossils exist to enlighten us. We do have a few data points in the evolutionary tree, though, and some of them are truly strange.
As you might expect, the transition from the land to the sea seems to have happened gradually. Most likely, rodentlike creatures spent increasingly long periods hunting at the water’s edge, until evolution selected for a greater lung capacity. In a few short millions of years, cetaceans as we know them emerged to dominate the seas.
2. Mammoths
Wooly mammoths aren’t the most alien of extinct creatures. They’re basically just big elephants with hair. They can even interbreed with elephants. But what makes mammoths so amazing is how recently they existed.
The last living mammoths died only around 10,000 years ago. That’s just before the beginning of what we believe to be the beginning of civilization. It’s so recent, in fact, that there are still loads of frozen mammoths hanging out under Siberian and Canadian permafrost. A few gastronomically adventurous Siberians have even eaten mammoth meat!
3. Giant Beavers
Beavers are fascinating and industrious creatures. Few wild things have such a knack for interior design. But they rarely intimidate, as they’re usually about the size of a small dog.
In the Pleistocene ice age era, things were different. Beavers grew well over two meters long, and if you messed with them, they’d build a dam on your corpse. Most scientists blame climate change for giant beavers’ decline, but there’s some evidence that one too many humans thought they looked tasty.
4. Ground Sloths
Ground sloths are in a unique category for North American mammals, as they no longer have any remaining relatives to give us a sense of what they might have been like. They’re distantly related to modern sloths, but they stood over five meters (17 feet) tall and walked on the ground in an upright posture quite different from any sloths today.
Fortunately, they’ve left us with tons of poop, which pack rats have been kind enough to preserve in caves. From this, we know that sloths were herbivorous, and they likely used their giant, terrifying claws for grasping vegetable matter, not smashing human skulls.
5. Giant Armadillos (Glyptodon)
Every modern creature seems to have its giant Pleistocene equivalent. Armadillos are no exception. Maybe you’ve looked at an armadillo and imagined how much cooler that armor would be if it were gigantic. Well, this was once reality.
6. Giant Birds (Argentavis)
The debate is pretty much settled at this point: birds are dinosaurs. But most of us can’t help being a little disappointed when we look out the window. Aside from the raptor clade, the most formidable beasts to have ever lived are now relegated to modest livelihoods pulling worms out of the ground or chewing on seeds.
Things were not always this way. Argentavis, the largest flying bird to have ever existed may have preyed upon mid-sized mammals and or even unwary feeding ground sloths.
7. Megalodon
With multiple discovery channel specials devoted to it and an excellent Mastodon (the band) tribute, megalodon needs no introduction. It’s a giant shark that grew up to 20 meters (66 ft) in length.
Like other animals on this list, one of the most terrifying things about megalodon is how recently it went extinct. Though it lived for around 20 million years, it only left our planet a little over three million years ago. With such a small margin of error, we might easily have lived in a world with megalodons making sea travel all but unthinkable.
8. Megalania
Unlike birds and insects, reptiles aren’t so bound by the rules of gravity. They can therefore grow much larger. If you think modern monitor lizards are big, megalania was far larger, reaching about the size of the largest crocodiles today. The dinosaurs might have gone extinct, but they had plenty of worthy successors.
9. Wooly Rhinocerous
A wooly mammoth in rhinoceros form. Things were colder then, and animals were bigger. And they didn’t live in Africa — they roamed Europe and North America, along with cheetahs, lions, hyenas, and other beasts we associate exclusively with the savannahs today.
10. Sabertoothed Cats (and marsupial equivalents)
The Pleistocene was a strange arms race between mammals and marsupials. Mammals evolved primarily in North America, and marsupials took South America. When the two continents converged through a thin strip of land, a bloodbath resulted. Hopefully, I’m not spoiling anything when I tell you that mammals won.
Everyone knows about sabertooth cats, and how their odd canines must have been helpful for some kind of hunting or scavenging. But few know that a separate sabertooth line was evolving in parallel — sabertooth marsupials. To the modern viewer, they seem almost nonsensical, but they must have made a living somehow. It’s still a bit of a debate.
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