The Fall of the Carnivorous Mastodon

Extinction sucks. Only yesterday, in geologic terms, did mastodons, sabercats, giant ground sloths, and their charismatic Ice Age contemporaries roam North America. Humans even encountered these beasts, but I was born about 10,000 years too late to see the Pleistocene menagerie. I just missed some of the most wonderful mammals ever to tread the continent.

When 18th-century scientists began to scrutinize the bones of these Pleistocene megamammals, though, extinction had not yet been universally recognized as a reality. By the hand of God or the balance of nature, every creature was believed to have a perpetual role to play on the Earth’s stage. Remove even one species from that order, and the whole theater might crumble with it. No surprise, then,

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