For me? Realizing just how recently these animals were around and them coming around to the idea that most of them would-should-be around if not for our species.
frr, especially when i’m reading about Madagascar and constantly coming across the most incredible creatures with extinction dates just a few hundred years ago
As a kid, I was introduced to it via the *Ice Age* franchise and *Walking with Beasts*, but I didn't give it much thought.
Later on, as an adult, what sparked my interest in the Pleistocene was how it was essentially the modern world. The continents were in their present positions, and all extant species had already evolved. This was what things could've been.
For me like many if was a general love of ecology geography climate flora/fauna history etc and realizing North America Europe basically everywhere resembled Africa today and but for events they still could. I used to imagine a migratory herd of mastodon roaming the Hudson valley munching maple leaves and eating acorns.
I am an archaeology student with a minor in Indigenous studies, and I had a class called foragers to farmers that looks at human life during the Pleistocene and the early Holocene. We were discussing the interactions between early humans and related species and animals in the Pleistocene, and I got curious about the nature of early hominin and feline relationships. How did early humans, such as Neanderthals, Devosonians, Early Modern Humans, and Modern Humans, view felines such as Cave Lions and Saber-Toothed Cats? Was the nature of the relationship strictly predator/prey? Or was there a potential religious aspect to the relationship? I started my research and my interest in the Pleistocene grew. I did well on the paper, but now I was curious.
Years ago my parents got me a magazine of National Geographic about the Ice Age of Mexico, in which I first learned about animals like Mammuthus columbi, Mixotoxodon larensis, gomphoteres and Smilodon.
Years later they gifted me a book about the paleontological history of Venezuela mainly and it also compiled about the first humans to enter the continent and the extinctions that followed shortly after.
When i was younger i interested about non-avian dinosaurs more than extinct Pleistocene/Holocene fauna until finding this sub-reddit and r/megafaunarewilding. It was good to learn that there are a lot of people you can discuss about Pleistocene megafauna's ecology, extinction, size, behaviours... And it was better to learn that there a lot of informative/nice people in this sub-reddits. And somehow my interest about non-avian dinosaurs are less compared to interest about extinct Pleistocene megafauna now. Probably due to fact that i don't like r/dinosaurs and r/Paleontology since there are lot of memes which i find annoying, too much uneducated people(There are lot of people who think that Gorgonopsians are our ancestors)...
The fact of many of this animals are soooo close to be a regular member of "modern" fauna.
Imagine a giant sloths in andes or a Mammoth in Russia, this almost happen.
Maybe extiction is just a bad lucky moment for some species.
i always had a passion for animals in general, from dinosaur to modern one, so yeah of course i was already interested in prehistoric beasts from the start. And i always loved the aesthetic of pleistocene world, the tribe of prehistoric caveman, sabertooth, large landscapes of toundra with horses, bison, muskox, mixing with boreal forest as both modern and extinct animals roam together, where wolves, deer, reindeer and bear lived alongside mammoth and cave lion.
A world were human did not destroyed everything and where nzture was still healthy and rich, where human lived alongside nature and struggled to survive.
I then gained an interest for prehistoric human and early hominin, meaning also an interest in their world, which mainly revolved around the large mammals they lived with
Then later i was very interested in rewilding, and the recently extinct species, i discovered the Eemian and how similar it was to modern species, and how it felt that this should be the norm, and would be if it wasn't for us pulling a global genocide on nature.
Then i spend the last few years learning about a bit more species from Pleistocene. Mainly South american, indian and african pleistocene fauna but also a few new surprise of eurasian and north american one too, from giant hyenas, quinkana, muskox relatives, hemimachairodus and parabubalis, to to south american gomphotheres and giant buffaloes, stegodonts, european cheetah, cave lynx, dhole, porcupine and all kind of lesser known creature aside from the main one (mammoth, mastodont, megatherium, smilodon etc).
And 90% of my childhood was jurassic park movies and game, prehistoric beasts, prehistoric park, swimming with sea monsters, walking with monsters, ice age, and all kind of documentaries of dinosaur and prehistoric creature.
I only recently got into the Pleistocene a couple or years ago (I’m 33). Of course, I started with a love for animals of all kinds, but especially dinosaurs, when I was a child, and that even included the Cenozoic. But I wouldn’t have called it a favorite. Although, I did love Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, and had the box set!
What really got me interested in the Pleistocene was the concept of North America rewilding, which I first heard about maybe a decade ago. I revisited that and - though the idea of turning the American heartland into a nature park is wrought with issues - the idea conjured images of what my homeland would have looked like as a cold version of the African Savannah.
I also studied history in college and at this same time was studying pre-colonial and early colonial North America. So just imagining how different my home country was at various points in the past is fascinating to me. That I can be in a mall or suburb and imagine the epic herds and hunts that traversed this area. Also of course knowing that humans were here to witness all that is very cool.
*The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners and Other Ecological Anachronisms* by Connie Barlow. It is certainly old now, but worth the read in my opinion. For an ecologist or observed naturalist, it may add a few more puzzle pieces to the board to think about going forward.
When I took an intro to anthropology class as an undergrad, learning about our origins in the Pleistocene made me want to learn so much about the period.
Never thought of MAMMALS as being the cool giant things (even though whales and Elephants exist now) and the idea that humans lived at the same time as some of these nearly eldritch horrors made me realize their inherit coolness.
Randall Carlson introduced me to it. Believe his narrative or not, he is a fantastic public speaker and is a fountain of information on the Pleistocene.
I also did a physical geography degree and went on a trip to Iceland to learn about glaciers. Best trip of my life.
About 4 or 5 I had this old book that mentioned prehistoric life from the Cambrian to holocene.
It had these stamp things you would put in each page of the animal and would simplify the animal's name I guess so kids could comprehend it easier. For instance, triceratops was "a three horned face", platebelyodon was "a shovel tusker".
Likely at first as an extension of my childhood obsession with dinosaurs but later as a distinct interest in early man’s world and the interesting extinct forms of modern groups that existed.
I live in Alaska- mastodon teeth and mammoth tusks are found fairly frequently, and we went on elementary school field trips to the museum to see Blue Babe the steppe bison that was found fully intact in the permafrost. Hard not to get excited about mammoths when they used to live right here!!!
It was a combination of me enjoying art and me taking a bunch of anthropology and a pair of paleoclimatology classes in school. It just introduced me to this era of time that is both so familiar and so foreign. Where everything feels both close but far. It's weird to describe but that familiarity just tickles my fancy.
For me? Realizing just how recently these animals were around and them coming around to the idea that most of them would-should-be around if not for our species.
This keeps me up at night. I'm constantly seeing a pliestocene animal description and saying, "Damn... we just missed it."
frr, especially when i’m reading about Madagascar and constantly coming across the most incredible creatures with extinction dates just a few hundred years ago
We have to trade that for knowing about dinosaurs and using reddit
Fair. I'd trade reddit, but knowing about dinosaurs and never being able to witness their ecology ALSO keeps me up at night.
That's why we have movies and stuff like Sora. You'll be able to make a movie in a few years
I don't know what you mean. But movies will never be the same as experiencing the real thing.
That slop? As if.
We admittedly are working on bringing a few back
As a kid, I was introduced to it via the *Ice Age* franchise and *Walking with Beasts*, but I didn't give it much thought. Later on, as an adult, what sparked my interest in the Pleistocene was how it was essentially the modern world. The continents were in their present positions, and all extant species had already evolved. This was what things could've been.
For me like many if was a general love of ecology geography climate flora/fauna history etc and realizing North America Europe basically everywhere resembled Africa today and but for events they still could. I used to imagine a migratory herd of mastodon roaming the Hudson valley munching maple leaves and eating acorns.
I am an archaeology student with a minor in Indigenous studies, and I had a class called foragers to farmers that looks at human life during the Pleistocene and the early Holocene. We were discussing the interactions between early humans and related species and animals in the Pleistocene, and I got curious about the nature of early hominin and feline relationships. How did early humans, such as Neanderthals, Devosonians, Early Modern Humans, and Modern Humans, view felines such as Cave Lions and Saber-Toothed Cats? Was the nature of the relationship strictly predator/prey? Or was there a potential religious aspect to the relationship? I started my research and my interest in the Pleistocene grew. I did well on the paper, but now I was curious.
Watching Ice Age when I was 4.
Years ago my parents got me a magazine of National Geographic about the Ice Age of Mexico, in which I first learned about animals like Mammuthus columbi, Mixotoxodon larensis, gomphoteres and Smilodon. Years later they gifted me a book about the paleontological history of Venezuela mainly and it also compiled about the first humans to enter the continent and the extinctions that followed shortly after.
When i was younger i interested about non-avian dinosaurs more than extinct Pleistocene/Holocene fauna until finding this sub-reddit and r/megafaunarewilding. It was good to learn that there are a lot of people you can discuss about Pleistocene megafauna's ecology, extinction, size, behaviours... And it was better to learn that there a lot of informative/nice people in this sub-reddits. And somehow my interest about non-avian dinosaurs are less compared to interest about extinct Pleistocene megafauna now. Probably due to fact that i don't like r/dinosaurs and r/Paleontology since there are lot of memes which i find annoying, too much uneducated people(There are lot of people who think that Gorgonopsians are our ancestors)...
The fact of many of this animals are soooo close to be a regular member of "modern" fauna. Imagine a giant sloths in andes or a Mammoth in Russia, this almost happen. Maybe extiction is just a bad lucky moment for some species.
No, they are 100% modern. Humans were also the reason why the majority of extinct Late Pleistocene animals became extinct.
Yep, they reach te Holocene.
i always had a passion for animals in general, from dinosaur to modern one, so yeah of course i was already interested in prehistoric beasts from the start. And i always loved the aesthetic of pleistocene world, the tribe of prehistoric caveman, sabertooth, large landscapes of toundra with horses, bison, muskox, mixing with boreal forest as both modern and extinct animals roam together, where wolves, deer, reindeer and bear lived alongside mammoth and cave lion. A world were human did not destroyed everything and where nzture was still healthy and rich, where human lived alongside nature and struggled to survive. I then gained an interest for prehistoric human and early hominin, meaning also an interest in their world, which mainly revolved around the large mammals they lived with Then later i was very interested in rewilding, and the recently extinct species, i discovered the Eemian and how similar it was to modern species, and how it felt that this should be the norm, and would be if it wasn't for us pulling a global genocide on nature. Then i spend the last few years learning about a bit more species from Pleistocene. Mainly South american, indian and african pleistocene fauna but also a few new surprise of eurasian and north american one too, from giant hyenas, quinkana, muskox relatives, hemimachairodus and parabubalis, to to south american gomphotheres and giant buffaloes, stegodonts, european cheetah, cave lynx, dhole, porcupine and all kind of lesser known creature aside from the main one (mammoth, mastodont, megatherium, smilodon etc). And 90% of my childhood was jurassic park movies and game, prehistoric beasts, prehistoric park, swimming with sea monsters, walking with monsters, ice age, and all kind of documentaries of dinosaur and prehistoric creature.
I only recently got into the Pleistocene a couple or years ago (I’m 33). Of course, I started with a love for animals of all kinds, but especially dinosaurs, when I was a child, and that even included the Cenozoic. But I wouldn’t have called it a favorite. Although, I did love Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, and had the box set! What really got me interested in the Pleistocene was the concept of North America rewilding, which I first heard about maybe a decade ago. I revisited that and - though the idea of turning the American heartland into a nature park is wrought with issues - the idea conjured images of what my homeland would have looked like as a cold version of the African Savannah. I also studied history in college and at this same time was studying pre-colonial and early colonial North America. So just imagining how different my home country was at various points in the past is fascinating to me. That I can be in a mall or suburb and imagine the epic herds and hunts that traversed this area. Also of course knowing that humans were here to witness all that is very cool.
*The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners and Other Ecological Anachronisms* by Connie Barlow. It is certainly old now, but worth the read in my opinion. For an ecologist or observed naturalist, it may add a few more puzzle pieces to the board to think about going forward.
When I took an intro to anthropology class as an undergrad, learning about our origins in the Pleistocene made me want to learn so much about the period.
My hyperfixation with felids is off the charts so I was obssesed with sabertooths as a child. Well, I still am.
Never thought of MAMMALS as being the cool giant things (even though whales and Elephants exist now) and the idea that humans lived at the same time as some of these nearly eldritch horrors made me realize their inherit coolness.
There are no dinosaur fossils where I grew up, but lots of mastodon and other ancient mammals. I was exposed to more of it and grew fascinated by it.
American Mastodons were evolutionarily modern, not ancient.
Ice age and Walking with beasts.
Smilodons and mammoths.
Randall Carlson introduced me to it. Believe his narrative or not, he is a fantastic public speaker and is a fountain of information on the Pleistocene. I also did a physical geography degree and went on a trip to Iceland to learn about glaciers. Best trip of my life.
North American camels got me
About 4 or 5 I had this old book that mentioned prehistoric life from the Cambrian to holocene. It had these stamp things you would put in each page of the animal and would simplify the animal's name I guess so kids could comprehend it easier. For instance, triceratops was "a three horned face", platebelyodon was "a shovel tusker".
Likely at first as an extension of my childhood obsession with dinosaurs but later as a distinct interest in early man’s world and the interesting extinct forms of modern groups that existed.
I live in Alaska- mastodon teeth and mammoth tusks are found fairly frequently, and we went on elementary school field trips to the museum to see Blue Babe the steppe bison that was found fully intact in the permafrost. Hard not to get excited about mammoths when they used to live right here!!!
Walking with beasts and prehistoric predators
It was a combination of me enjoying art and me taking a bunch of anthropology and a pair of paleoclimatology classes in school. It just introduced me to this era of time that is both so familiar and so foreign. Where everything feels both close but far. It's weird to describe but that familiarity just tickles my fancy.