megafauna

Farther inland, you can spot all kinds of life-list megafauna within just a few hours of Montréal.

The opening is for an ecosystems stewardship administrator, a brand-new role that will include managing the local megafauna, planning new public lands, and metering local carbon use.

Strikingly, this transition happened only after the ice age megafauna—mammoths, giant ground sloths, giant deer, and horses—disappeared.

Seven of those layers, in the area Bennett and his colleagues recently excavated, held human tracks along with those of long-lost megafauna.

The combination of a weak magnetic field and this decrease in the sun’s output around the same time “created the perfect storm” of climate and broader environmental changes, placing a major stress on megafauna populations, Turney says.

Within a few thousand years of human arrival on Australia, all the continent's megafauna were hunted to extinction.