- I used to always wonder as a child as well why there were no ‘impressive’ creatures in Europe and why most of the big animals were in Africa. The truth, that I only properly (re)discovered this summer, is that all sorts of magnificently large creatures termed ‘megafauna’ existed on all continents, including Europe. The straight-tusked elephant, for example, ranged across all of Eurasia from Spain to China. Now if you mention there were once elephants in Spain, some people would look at you as if you’re crazy.
They have wonderful models of Australian megafauna in museums here, imagine elephant-sized kangaroos with the faces of massive koalas. It's a controversial subject because there are theories that Aboriginals wiped them out which does not fit the current "gentle, environmentally-consciousl custodians of the land" image.
The idea that natives were "Gentle savages" is dead wrong. They, just like ancient humanity, modern humanity, and future humanity, were greedy, capitalistic, irrational, groups that go around taking what they want through force and destroying the lands around them in the process. And that's the way we like it!
If you like things like megafauna and paleontology, and comics, you may like this Dresden Codak page. The article made me think of it, anyway. I wonder…intelligence presumably requires a certain level of mass. Does this suggest that any relatively highly intelligent species will likely exterminate any other species large enough to evolve high intelligence? So, would all planets where life has evolved result in a single sentient species?‘homo sapiens growth rate and hunting ability almost always led to mass extinctions, with hunting ability being the most important of all parameters’. Big animals are particularly susceptible to extinction
Maybe. But maybe not for the reasons I originally thought. Thinking about it some more, we haven't exterminated gorillas, for example. But there are 7,000,000,000 humans and 100,000 gorillas. Evolution can't happen very fast with only 100k individuals. So, I'm still inclined to think any planet would result in one sapient species, but maybe not from hunting as much as simply virally overtaking a world.
What an awesome looking animal and I like the rendition. I want to see a giant sloth.