"Megafauna" (large animals weighing over 45 kg) play extremely important roles in shaping their ecosystems. For hundreds of millions of years, including through multiple glacial–interglacial transitions, megafauna have been abundant across all landscapes and seascapes on Earth. The last 50,000 years, however, have been marked by a dramatic decline in megafaunal abundance and diversity. Leading up to the end of the Pleistocene era 12,000 years ago, co-incident waves of human arrival and overhunti

Penny Thomson deflty capturs animals' movements in these miniature ecosystems operated with a simple hand-crank. See more today on Colossal: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2021/08/penny-thomson-miniatures/ | Colossal

"We’re Colossal Biosciences, the de-extinction company responsible for bringing back the first animals from extinction. Our dire wolf pups, Romulus and Remus, were born on October 1, 2024. Watch these pups grow up on our YouTube channel. Link in bio. These two wolves were returned from extinction using genetic edits derived from a complete dire wolf genome, meticulously reconstructed from ancient DNA found in fossils dating back 11,500 and 72,000 years. This achievement is the result of years of