The mammoth steppe
A cold, dry grassland stretches from Spain to Canada — the largest biome on Earth.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.2 million years
- Known to
- ± 200 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
During glacial phases, low sea level, low carbon dioxide and intense continental aridity produce an enormous grassland belt across northern Eurasia and into Alaska and Yukon: the mammoth steppe. It is cold but productive, dominated by grasses and herbs rather than moss, and it supports a dense large-mammal fauna of mammoth, horse, bison, reindeer and woolly rhinoceros. Nothing like it exists today, and its disappearance at the end of the last glacial is tied up with the megafaunal extinctions.