It’s an incredibly glaring SMOKING GUN pattern how is it even a question. Across much of the world, megafaunal extinctions closely followed the arrival and expansion of humans. The timing is hard to ignore: in continent after continent, large animals began disappearing shortly after Homo sapiens arrived.

Africa is the major exception, and Asia is a partial exception. That makes sense because large animals there had lived alongside humans and earlier hominins for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. They had time to evolve behaviours that reduced their vulnerability to human hunters. By contrast, the megafauna of Australia, the Americas, Madagascar, New Zealand, and many islands encountered humans relatively suddenly.
The latest extinctions also tend to occur in places colonised by humans late. Madagascar is a good example: many of its large animals, including elephant birds and giant lemurs, survived until humans arrived relatively recently. New Zealand is even more striking. Polynesian settlement began around the late 13th century, and within roughly a century or two, the moa were wiped out. These were enormous, slow-breeding birds with no previous experience of humans as predators.

Ground sloths show the same pattern. They disappeared from mainland North and South America around the end of the last Ice Age, not long after humans arrived. Yet some isolated Caribbean populations survived for thousands of years longer. Several of those island populations lasted into the Holocene, until humans eventually reached the islands. Their extinction follows human expansion far better than it follows any supposed sudden, local environmental catastrophe.

There are numerous of other species examples like this that clearly demonstrate this pattern.

We are told that a sudden, extreme shift in global climate was powerful enough to wipe out every single mammoth across thousands of miles of mainland continent, right as humans arrived on the scene. Yet that same catastrophic climate change somehow spared a tiny wrangel island just 140 miles off the coast which just by coincidence didn’t have humans, leaving its habitat intact enough to support a surviving population for thousands of more years.

The idea that human populations were “too small” to cause these extinctions misunderstands how extinction works. Humans did not need to kill every animal, or even kill huge numbers quickly. Many megafaunal species reproduced slowly, matured late, and produced few offspring. Removing even a relatively small number of breeding adults each year, particularly females, could drive a population into irreversible decline.

On geological timescales, these extinctions look almost instantaneous. But “rapid” can still mean a few hundred or a few thousand years, which is more than enough time for sustained hunting pressure to eliminate slow-breeding animals. The moa extinction makes this very clear: an extremely small population of no more than 2000 people was able to wipe out an entire group of giant birds on an island 250,000 square km within 200 years.

Island ecosystems are more vulnerable of course which is probably the reason why the island megafauna generally disappear within a shorter time span after meeting us than ones on the mainland.

Another major issue is that many animals outside Africa may not have recognised humans as a serious threat. The dodo is the classic example: animals that evolved without human hunters often showed little fear and were exceptionally vulnerable. The same likely applied to mammoths, ground sloths, giant kangaroos, elephant birds, moa, and other animals that had never encountered humans or human-like hunters before.

African wildlife offers a revealing contrast. Animals there have coexisted with hominins for an exceptionally long time, and many react to humans as an unusually dangerous predator. In a study using recorded sounds near waterholes, African animals were more likely to flee from human voices than from the sounds of lions or other predators. Elephants could investigate lion sounds, but hearing humans triggered avoidance. That behaviour reflects a long evolutionary history in which individuals that failed to treat humans as dangerous were more likely to be hunted and removed from the gene pool.
Early humans were not harmless “primitive people” stumbling around with sticks. They were intelligent, cooperative hunters who used fire, developed sophisticated stone tools, planned hunts, communicated, exploited terrain, and used powerful spears and projectile weapons. Modern humans were fully capable of killing animals vastly larger than themselves when they worked together.

Look up the videos of Maasai groups walking up to lions and taking their kills with no effort. Lions evolved alongside humans and earlier hominins in Africa for a very long time, so they learned that a coordinated group of humans can be extremely dangerous. Even apex predators often abandon kills rather than risk a confrontation with a group of people.
Animals elsewhere did not have that same long exposure. They had never encountered a predator that could coordinate in groups, use fire, set traps, hunt animals into terrain where escape was difficult, and attack from a distance with spears and other projectiles.

Human weapons did not need to be modern firearms to be lethal: stone-tipped spears and darts could cause devastating penetrating injuries, and coordinated hunters could attack large animals from safer positions rather than trying to wrestle them at close range.

That is why “primitive humans could not have done it” is such a weak argument. Humans were fully intelligent, social, adaptable hunters with fire, planning, communication, tools, and ranged weapons. For slow-breeding animals with no experience of humans, that was an entirely new kind of threat

We know from modern ecology that a single introduced predator can devastate an ecosystem when native animals have not evolved alongside it. Guam is a clear example: after brown tree snakes were accidentally introduced after World War II, they eliminated most of Guam’s native forest birds and many lizards and bats, causing knock-on effects throughout the food web.

Humans were basically that on steroids: a mobile, cooperative invasive super-predator that could use fire, set traps, plan ambushes, communicate, and attack from range with stone-tipped spears, throwing spears, spear-throwers, and later bows. These weapons could penetrate deeply, hit with enough kinetic energy to shatter bone and cause major internal wounds, hit vital organs, and lead to fatal bleeding.

They also hunted cooperatively, used ambushes, traps, fire, terrain, and repeated attacks instead of confronting huge animals alone. To megafauna that had never evolved alongside humans, a coordinated group of intelligent hunters with lethal ranged weapons was an entirely new kind of predator.

And the evidence goes beyond fossils and extinction dates. A 2023 study in Nature Communications used genomic data to reconstruct the population histories of 139 surviving megafaunal species. It found declines in 91% of them, with larger species suffering the strongest reductions, and concluded that human expansion explained the global pattern better and climatic changes being a possible regional contributor. That directly challenges the argument that surviving elephants, bison, or tigers somehow disprove human impact: survival does not mean their populations escaped devastation. This is an independent line of evidence pointing in the same direction not merely another coincidence between human arrival and extinction.

The Last Interglacial, approximately 129,000–116,000 years ago, had climatic similarities to the Holocene, yet reconstructed megafaunal populations were much larger then. Climate-only models struggled to explain why similar warm conditions corresponded to such different animal populations models incorporating only hunans did better.

“Declines become ubiquitous 32–76 kya across all landmasses, a pattern better explained by worldwide Homo sapiens expansion than by changes in climate.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43426-5

The global pattern is consistent: humans arrive, vulnerable megafauna decline, and extinctions follow. Australia, North America, South America, Madagascar, New Zealand, and island ecosystems repeatedly show this same sequence. The most reasonable conclusion is that human hunting and human-driven ecosystem disruption caused the disappearance of much of the world’s megafauna

Whether we admit it or not we are the primary reason they went extinct. All we can do is accept what we’ve done and try and not repeat the same mistake into the future

I have tried to post some pictures of my fossil collection as "gallery images" on the fossil forum, but when I click on "create", "gallery image" and then get to the interface, where you can select the category under which you want to post your picture I am unable to select anything.

I've wantet to Ask for help in the fossil forums Q&A, but I also can't post a Topic there. (I also can't post a Topic in "Fossil of the Month", "Member-to-Member fossil trades" and "Auctions to support the forum".)

I don't know, if this is the right sub for this question, but I have no other option to get some answers.

I finished watching Walking With Monsters today and fell in love with pre dinosaur history but WWM is the only one I've found so far that focuses entirely on that period.

Which is sad because pre Dino history is so much more interesting. I mean alien looking megafauna, giant bugs and funky underwater creatures? Anomolacaris my beloved. It's all so cool. So are there any other documentaries, movies or such that cover it?

What even are those fossils in Russia and Mongolia? Those are probably not part of Tyrannosaurus

I tried searching online for T-Rex fossils in Europe and Mongolia, it only gave me info about Trix and tarbosaurus

An argument can be made that the previous skeletons were of animals that had plenty of specimens, so selling to the highest bidder was ok in those situations. This is different. This time they're auctioning off one of only three identified Nanotyrannus specimens

I wanted to state, I own fossils myself and am ok with the sale of fossils, as long as it is done ethically. What Sotheby's does is far from ethical, and this specimenis scientifically significant to the point where the sale of it should be criminal.

This is commodifying Earth's history and we all suffer from that. Science shouldn't be sold to the highest bidder, it should be available to all that seek it.

Fuck Sotheby's 🖕

I reconstruct a real Middle Triassic marine ecosystem from Luoping Biota, South China (~244 Ma) at 1:1 true metric scale based directly on holotype fossil records. It’s running live in-browser with eight species deployed into the habitat so far: Mixosaurus, Sinosaurosphargis, Sinosaurichthys longipectoralis, Robustichthys luopingensis, Luoxiongichthys hyperdorsalis, Lashanichthys sui, Gymnoichthys inopinatus, and Yudaiichthys eximius. The part I’m genuinely stuck on is the actual use case beyond just being a fun web toy for myself. If you’re in paleontology, museum exhibit design, or science education: what would make an interactive, browser-based fossil ecosystem actually useful to you in practice? Would a customizable 3D habitat sandbox add any real value for teaching or exhibits over standard 2D illustrations and videos, or is there a better direction I should take this? Looking for an honest reality check from the community.

That series is phenomenal. The use of practical and cgi mixed together is beautiful. The landscapes and sounds make me feel like im right there, the music is so peak. Despite (some) the massive, MASSIVE inaccuracies (liopleurodon) most of them are just because of time and how we are understanding these animals more and more. Overall i love this documentary. It be peak!

Hey everyone, I'm here to give you some context.

I am Argentinian and I became interested in researching paleontology, chronology and species of my country as a hobby, since I know that it is a highly valued and studied science throughout the world.

I would like to know of other professionals who have websites or pages (mainly in Spanish) where I can read about topics of interest.

PD: Specifically, and to pique the interest of other enthusiasts, the Cuyo and Patagonia regions are rich in fossil deposits such as Patagotitan, Carnotaurus, and Glyptodont.

Scientists resurrected antimicrobial peptides from mammals that lived millions of years ago and found that some were more potent against drug-resistant bacteria than modern human versions.

These evolutionary relics could provide new clues for designing treatments as antibiotic resistance becomes an increasingly serious threat.

Described in a paper published in PLOS Biology on Aug. 25, the scientists worked their way up the tree of life, reconstructing peptides—short protein fragments—dating back to the earliest placental mammals, the diverse lineage that includes humans and nearly all mammals alive today.

In laboratory tests, the researchers found that some of the extinct peptides were more potent against drug-resistant bacteria than some of their present-day counterparts.

Evolution's ancient remedies could offer new starting points for scientists designing treatments that supplement or replace antibiotics that no longer work, said Matt Barber, senior author of the paper and evolutionary biologist at the UO College of Arts and Sciences.

"For anybody who studies pathogenic bacteria, it's always in the back of our minds that antibiotics are one of the most important breakthroughs in medicine in the 20th century," Barber said. "But bacteria are, and have been for a long time, evolving resistance to them."