Extinct

Information about extinct mammals of North America:

The massive amount of mammals that have lived on the earth and gone extinct is amazing in their diversity and variance of size. Some of the most interesting occurred during the the Pleistocene Epoch, which lasted from 1.65 million until about 10,000 years ago. During that time numerous types of land mammals inhabited the area that is now the Americas. While no one is completely sure why, most of the larger mammals died off, including the Saber-Tooth Cat, the Megatherium – which was a giant ground sloth of South America, the Mastodon, the Dire Wolf and the Short-Faced Bear.

Some theories are that a small meteor affected the local climate, that the invasion of early humans hunted them to extinction, or that there was enough of a climate change to drastically effect them – or that it was a combination of some or all of these factors. A few years ago, a near perfectly preserved baby wooly mammoth was found, and it it hoped that one day DNA taken from the animal might give scientist the ability to “grow” one of these long extinct animals.