Not cute and endearing like present-day sloths in South America, these sloths were one of the strangest animals of the ice age. That claw didn’t belong to a fearsome meat eater, but to a massive, cumbersome sloth ( Megalonyx jeffersonii). He asked for the explorers Lewis and Clark to keep a look out for giant lions while they travelled west across the country. Before becoming president, Thomas Jefferson was head of the American Philosophical Society and certain that the claw was the remnant of a monstrous predator. When a giant fossilized claw was discovered in West Virginia in the late 1700s, there was great excitement over what extinct animal it could have belonged to. Prey in the ice age was plentiful horses, deer, and camels roamed the land in great numbers. Scientists think they could have lived in prides, working together to hunt and raise young. Paleolithic art of similar lions found on cave walls in France and Russia show that the prehistoric cats had a faintly striped coat and no mane, unlike modern lions. It stood 1.2 metres at the shoulder and weighed up to 420 kilograms. The American cave lion ( Panthera atrox) called this continent home and was one of the largest known cats, almost 25 per cent bigger than the lions we see in Africa and India today. Twenty thousand years ago, lions roamed the entire planet. Lions roamed the landĪlthough the bears in ice age North America were the biggest and most powerful carnivores, they had some stiff competition. Nevertheless, the short-faced bear would have been a towering, frightening beast. We don’t know if these bears were ferocious hunters, chasing down their prey at 40 km/h, or far-ranging scavengers that followed the faint scent of a carcass using their acute sense of smell.
They had slender limbs compared to the heavily-built bears we see today and stood tall, reaching 4 metres when reared up - more like a grizzly bear on stilts. It was one of the biggest and most powerful predators the world has seen, weighing an immense 900 kilograms and standing 2 metres at the shoulder. In prehistoric North America, the short-faced bear ( Arctodus simus) ruled the land. If so, they would have encountered a strange cast of ferocious predators and giant herbivores who lived here during the Ice Age. However, a new Nature of Things documentary, Ice Bridge, outlines the theory of two rogue archeologists who believe that people may have arrived here thousands of years earlier and from a very different place.Īrcheologists Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley propose that people from western Eurasia (now called Europe), known as ‘Solutreans’, travelled here by crossing the Atlantic Ocean, following the giant ice shelf that covered the northern Atlantic during the ice age 20,000 years ago.įilmmakers Use Special Effects To Bring Back Ice Age Animals Most archeologists agree that human beings reached North America 14,000 years ago, crossing a land bridge that existed between eastern Russia and modern-day Alaska.
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