Have you watched the ice age series? The Ice Age is a fantastic movie, and it’s maybe everyone’s favorite.
You might have noticed amazing animal species in that movie. Some animals shown in the film are extinct species. You will be fascinated by knowing about their reality and their origin.
Let us know about them.
Table of Contents
WOOLLY MAMMOTH
The woolly mammoth is sometimes cited as the best sketch of an ice-age mammal. These big, woolly elephants were made for life on Yukon’s Mammoth Steppe during the Ice Age. A woolly mammoth weighed more than 200 kilograms of grass daily and stood little more than three meters tall at the shoulder. It resembled an African elephant in size.
BERINGIAN LION
The largest and most several cats in the Ice Age Yukon, Beringian lions lived there between 125,000 and 13,000 years ago. Although they looked most similar to modern African lions, they were larger. To slay their prey, they had long, sharp claws. The hide of “Blue Baby,” a mummified bison discovered frozen in Alaska, has lion claw marks.
GIANT SHORT-FACED BEAR
The largest mammalian land carnivore to have ever lived in North America was the short-faced bear from the Ice Age. While standing on their back legs, these bears reached heights of around 3.4 meters, compared to nearly 1.5 meters when they were walking normally. They might have been able to reach upwards of 4.3 meters. This is around 1.5 times the size of a Kodiak grizzly bear today!
JEFFERSON’S GROUND SLOTH
The Jefferson’s ground sloth may be the most amazing animal ever in Yukon. These strange creatures are distant cousins of the tree sloths, still in Central and South America today. Some five million years ago, the sloth family left South America and crossed the Panama Canal to move north. During the Ice Age, a number of ground sloth species existed in North and South America, but only the one bearing the name of former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson made it as far north as Yukon and Alaska.
AMERICAN MASTODON
Mastodon or mammoth? These two names are often used mutually to refer to large, hairy ice-era elephants. Despite the fact that they are both closely related to elephants, these two creatures are very different from one another. 25 million years ago, the American mastodon’s ancestors broke away from the mammoths. They eventually made it across Beringia, moving from Asia towards the east, some 15 million years ago. The American mastodon appeared in North America, as its name suggests, about 3.5 million years ago. The American mastodon had a huge geographic range during the Ice Age, passing from Northern Alaska to the tropics of Honduras, even though it never made the voyage back into Asia!
STEPPE BISON
The bison are still present today, unlike many other ice-era creatures. The bison are still present today, unlike many other ice-era creatures.
Towards the end of the last glacial period, some famous ice age animals survived. The steppe bison is one picture. The wood bison and the plains bison are two species of remaining bison descended from steppe bison, which continued until recently. The ice age grassland bison possessed considerably larger horns than their modern cousins, although having a similar body size. About a million years ago, in the early Ice Age, the steppe bison’s ancestors, known as Bison bonasus, appeared in the grasslands of Europe and Asia.
AMERICAN SCIMITAR CAT
The saber-tooth cat (Smilodon fatalis), possibly the most well-known representation of the Ice Age, is only found in more southern regions of North America, extending no further North than southern Alberta. Perhaps a better, proper iconic predator of the ice age globe is the more common ripper cat (Homotherium serum). The size and shape of their large canine teeth make the scimitar cat and its saber-toothed ancestor most immediately separable. The upper canines of the scimitar cat are smaller, jagged, and “dirk-shaped,” but those of its saber-toothed relative are larger and “saber-shaped.” Although both cats would have become excellent hunters, only scimitar cat remains have ever been discovered in Yukon.
YUKON’S CAMELS
Many people are surprised to learn that camels formerly lived in northern Canada. In Yukon, fossils from two different species of camel have been discovered. The oldest of these, known as the Yukon gigantic camel (Paracamenlus), was a precursor of the domestic camels that are still in existence today and may be found in the deserts of Asia and Africa. The second was the more modern western camel (Camelops western us).
GREY WOLF
The current boreal forest and Arctic tundra are home to grey wolves, possibly the most recognizable animals. They are gregarious animals that hunt most wildlife in the North today, such as colossal caribou and moose, in packs. They were shared on the Mammoth Steppe, according to Yukon fossils. The most frequent carnivore fossils discovered in Beringia are those of grey wolves. They were one of the few predators in North America that kept going from the Pleistocene to the present.
FLAT-HEADED PECCARY
Bars throughout North and South America have a long evolutionary history and are distantly related to the real pigs of Europe and Asia. The European wild boar (Sus scrofa), which the flat-headed peccary (Platygonis compresses) was about the size of, stands around 75 centimeters tall at the shoulder. Skulls of peccaries from the Ice Age point to a small brain with a keen sense of smell and vision. They may have filtered the dry, dusty air sweeping across the ice age environment with their large noses and nasal cavities.
ELK
Elk, sometimes known as wapiti, are deer-family animals that date back to the European Ice Age. Around 400,000 years ago, their typical knobs with the doubled lower tine first appeared in the fossil record of Europe. Elk were well adapted to withstand the ebb and flow of hot and cold weather. These fossils are from warmer Ice Age periods when trees and shrubs were more common than grasslands and are more numerous and extensive. Even so, elk fossils from the Ice Age’s coldest times, when trees were typically nonexistent, have been discovered in some locations.
CARIBOU
The Yukon’s most familiar animal is arguably the caribou or reindeer. They have a long history in the North; they were first revealed in Beringia as early as 2 million years ago. Caribou, a member of the numerous New World deer species, are best suited to the harsh arctic environment. You might be surprised to learn that researchers think this well-known northern species has roots in South America, with its first ancestors migrating north through the Panama Isthmus around 5 million years ago.
WALRUS
Some people would be surprised to find that steppe bison and woolly mammoth bones can be found alongside those of ancient walruses. Every spring and summer, Herschel Island off the northern coast of Yukon receives an unusual combination of fossils washed up on the beaches of the Beaufort Sea. These beaches are among Yukon’s most important fossil locations, and the only place where ice-age marine animal remains may be found.
YUKON HORSE
The horse was one of the most common creatures in the icy, treeless steppe of the ice age Yukon. Horses and their descendants have been on this continent for a long time, unlike the steppe bison, which was very recent to North America. In reality, horses first appeared and developed in North America, much like the wild horses that we now know best from Africa and Eurasia. The last time there were no horses in North America was about 55 million years ago when horses went extinct.
GIANT BEAVER
Think of rodents that big! The large beaver truly belonged in the Ice Age. The gigantic beaver is the biggest rodent, stretching up to two meters long and weighing 100 kilograms. The massively large beaver is known from fossil sites around North America, but it is most common there and nearby the Great Lakes on the Atlantic coast. Banana-sized fossilized incisors and large beaver molars have been found in northern Yukon on the banks and cliffs of the Old Crow and Porcupine Rivers. The Vuntut Gwich’in of Old Crow’s traditional folklore from long ago regularly includes stories of the large beaver.
ARCTIC GROUND SQUIRREL
The Arctic ground squirrel has likely told us the most about the ice-era world of all the ice-period creatures still alive today. About 10 million years ago, ground squirrels first emerged in North America but soon spread north and west into Europe. The oldest known Arctic ground squirrel remains, which date from 1.8 to 2.5 million years ago, were unearthed in Alaska. These medium-sized rodents can now be found throughout the Circumpolar North, from Russia to the Canadian Eastern Arctic, beyond the treeline, or in clearings lacking trees. A rare population of jet-black Arctic ground squirrels lives along the Alaska Highway south of Whitehorse, Yukon, and is regularly spotted along roadside areas throughout much of the southern Yukon.
SAIGA ANTELOPE
Saiga antelope are odd-looking antelope, goat, and sheep relatives. During the Ice Age, they moved across the Mammoth Steppe from England to the Mackenzie Delta in the Northwest Territories.These days, they are only found in central Asia’s semi-deserts and dry steppes, close to Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Fossilized bones show that the ice period saiga antelope were 10–15% bigger than their modern parallel. This shows that the ice period steppes of Beringia supported more multiple vegetation with less competition for resources than their habitat does today.
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