A long, long time ago, marsupials the size of small trucks, 2-meter-tall "thunder birds" and 5-meter-long venomous lizards roamed Australia. These animals—and more—were Australia's megafauna.

Are elephants important? How about rhinoceros? Or lions? What happens if Earth loses its last remaining large animals? New research by Professor of Biology Felisa Smith at the University of New Mexico ...

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Earth once hosted many massive creatures called megafauna; they are technically defined as animals with mature body weights that exceed 44 kilograms (97 pounds). Megaherbivores, on the other hand, are ...

Analyses of ancient fossils suggest that early Australian Aborigines did not wipe out the continent's megafauna in a frenzied hunting rampage. New research conducted by Australian and British ...

Zygomaturus trilobus - a marsupial with no modern day comparisons that probably lived in the wetter areas of Australia, ...

Jabiru birds fly past a herd of Columbian Mammoths as they make their way across a river delta. A new study published in Nature Communications suggests that the extinction of North America's largest ...

Ancient clues, in the shape of fossils and archaeological evidence of varying quality scattered across Australia, have formed the basis of several hypotheses about the fate of megafauna that vanished ...

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The end of the Pleistocene epoch saw the extinction of large-bodied herbivores around the world. Numerical modelling suggests that continental-scale effects of this extinction on nutrient transport ...