Many years ago, sometime during the previous millennium, I was taken to an African game park -- elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and lions (the hippos were AWOL). It was astonishing to see these huge beasts. I didn't realize at the time that it was semi-miraculous that these creatures had survived to our day, even in a de facto zoo, when so many other massive animals had recently gone extinct. When homo sapiens arrived on the scene, say 50,000 years ago, there were many animals that would have made a zoo park several orders of magnitude more remarkable that the one I visited. Why did these beasts go extinct? Disease, habitat change, and competition are likely culprits but it's hard to deny that our predatory ancestors must take some of the blame.
Yes, the game park had lions, but it would have been infinitely more exciting if it housed not only the African lion, but the European lion which was half again as large and which survived lately enough to be well known to the Greeks.
Other big cats were also missing: the famous saber tooth, everyone's nightmare, as well as the American false cheetah, a cheetah-like cougar weighing 190 formidable pounds. I would also have liked to see the thylacine, the so-called "marsupial lion" or sometimes "Tasmanian tiger" which survived until 1936, late enough to be photographed.
I would also have liked to see a cackle of European hyenas. Even more, the two-ton short-faced Bear, with whom our paleolithic ancestors competed, which was three times the size of a modern polar bear. The equally large ground sloth, even the bones of which are impressive.
And the sloth lemur, the size of a big male gorilla. The Irish deer, as big as a moose, with an outsized, out-of-proportion rack. Then there were the elephant-like animals: the Columbian mammoth of the American southwest, smaller than its modern African cousin, but with astonishingly curved tusks. The wooly mammoth, surviving until just 3700 years ago on Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast. The straight-tusked elephant, two or three times the size of modern African elephant. The North American mammoths. And also Cuvier's gompothere, which looks like an elephant but isn't one, but which was seven feet tall at the shoulder and which lasted until about 14,000 years ago:
And along with them, the morningstar-tailed glyptodon, a five thousand pound armadillo:
I would have loved to cast my eye on the diprotodont, the largest known marsupial, which weighed in at three tons and lived until 45,000 years ago
The wooly rhinoceros, as large as a diprotodont. The sivathere, an odd-looking giraffid. The tree kangaroo. The short-faced kangaroo, three times the size of any living kangaroo.
And right there in Vermont, rustling and stomping in the forest, were the stag moose and Jefferson's ground sloth and the long-nosed peccary and Harlan's musk ox and the Vero tapir and the giant beaver, all recently gone. (You wouldn't have wanted to come face-to-face with a giant beaver. Or swim in its pond, if it made ponds. You'd be better off listening to it slapping its tail in a game park.)
And then there were some true avian oddities worth taking a gander at: the flightless moas of New Zealand, the female at 440 pounds, two-and-half times the size of the male. The cursorial owl, a three-foot tall flightless owl, which pursued its prey afoot. Haast's eagle, with a wingspread of seven and a half feet. The five hundred pound Elephant Bird, which survived in Madagascar until a thousand years ago.
And then the tarpan, the warrah, the toxodon. Strangest of all, macrauchenia, a three-toed ungulate not closely related to anything alive today, which looked something like a humpless camel with a droopy snout and which was around until about 10,000 years ago.
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It would have been quite a show if these animals had survived. Well worth the price of admission.
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