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.

A sweeping new study is helping pinpoint where whales, sharks, turtles, and other ocean giants need the most protection and where current efforts fall short. Led by Ana Sequeira of the Australian ...

Where are the great marine animals of the Mediterranean, such as the fin whale, the sperm whale or the bottlenose dolphin? How does their distribution change over a few weeks? All indications suggest ...

Donald Grayson, an archeologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, along with colleague David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University, believes that climate changes at the end of the ...

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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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

If things had turned out differently in past millennia, modern-day animal lovers wouldn't have to fly to Kenya to go on safari. North America was once overrun with tourism-worthy animals: Aside from ...