The Americas lose their megafauna
Mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, sabre-tooths, horses and camels vanish within about a thousand years.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.3 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 500 years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
Between roughly 13,000 and 11,700 years ago North and South America lose around three quarters of their large mammal genera — including every proboscidean, the ground sloths, glyptodonts, Smilodon, dire wolves, American lions and the native horses and camels. The losses coincide with both human arrival and the abrupt Younger Dryas climate swing, which is precisely why the cause is so hard to isolate. The removal of horses is a striking accident of history: the continent that produced them has none until 1493.