About 10,000 years ago, giant beavers roamed the North American continent, along with now-extinct woolly mammoths and mastodons.
About 10,000 years ago, giant beavers roamed the North American continent, along with now-extinct woolly mammoths and mastodons.
Now, for the first time, a new study from Western University has uncovered a possible reason the giant beaver went extinct too at the end of the last Ice Age: its vanishing food source.
The research shows these enormous rodents, weighing as much as 100 kilograms, ate submerged aquatic plants but did not eat wood – a distinct (and perhaps deadly) divergence from its dentally endowed descendant.
Today’s North American beavers, Castor canadensis, weigh 10 to 35 kilograms and are the largest rodents living in Canada. But their now-extinct cousins – the Justin-Bieber-sized giant beaver, Castoroides – didn’t spend their days building supersized dams or munching monstrous trees.
Continue reading at Western University.
Image via Western University.
