From Alaska to South America, the first humans to arrive consistently hunted megafauna to extinction.

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.

"The art of tracking may well be the origin of science." This is the departure point for a 2013 book by Louis Liebenberg, co-founder of an organization devoted to environmental monitoring. The demise ...

A new study in PNAS shows that the extinction of large mammals between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago permanently altered predator-prey networks, especially in the Americas. These simplified food webs ...

Ten thousand years ago, the Americas teemed with mastodons, giant ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats. Within a few millennia, nearly all of them were gone. A study published in April 2025 in the ...

The extinction of the megafauna – giant marsupials that lived in Australia until 60,000 to 45,000 years ago – is a topic of fierce debate. Some researchers have suggested a reliance on certain plants ...

Sudden deaths : the chronology of terminal Pleistocene megafaunal extinction / Stuart Fiedel -- Estimates of Clovis-era megafaunal populations and their extinction risks / Gary Haynes -- Paleobiology ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. A new study has uncovered the likely cause behind the mysterious ...

Fossils and ancient DNA archive millennia of ecological change that modern experiments are too short to capture. Because isotopes are preserved in fossil tissues, we analyze tusks, teeth, and bones of ...

The first people to inhabit the Americas had a singular obsession: the biggest animals on the landscape. A July 2026 study in Science Advances makes the case that Paleolithic populations from Alaska ...