What Animals Were Alive During the Ice Age?

The Earth has experienced several Ice Ages throughout history. These periods were marked by expansive ice sheets covering large regions.

Beavers the size of bears and sloths weighing as much as 3,000 pounds were just some of the extra-large mammals that thrived during the Ice Age, commonly referred to as mega fauna.

Mammoths

These massive herbivorous mammals fed on tough tundra plants, with tufts of hair on their heads to retain warmth, as well as an insulating coat covering their bodies and spending 16-18 hours each day eating and hydrating themselves.

Mammoths were well-known animals during the Ice Age and can be seen depicted in cave art. Unfortunately, due to climate change, shifting vegetation and overhunting by humans they became extinct over time.

Fossils of fossilized mastodons have long been revered. Mummies of these ancient beasts have been discovered in Siberia; more recently in 2017 scientists unearthed one with its whiskers still attached. Other animals that thrived during the Ice Age included warm-blooded mammals like saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and snowshoe hare (rabbits); reptiles like crocodiles and snakes such as Megalania sulcata which measured over 7 metres long!

Mastodons

The Mastodon follows in the footsteps of Woolly Mammoths as both species became extinct approximately 11,000 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. While their demise remains unclear, potential factors may have included climate change and hunting by early humans who needed them as food sources.

These gigantic creatures (they could weigh as much as 6 tons!) were related to elephants but had different jaws suited for eating woody material like branches and bark. Additionally, their knobby molars helped crush grass more effectively than later mammoths or elephants did.

During the Ice Age, these animals lived in diverse habitats ranging from tropical rainforests to polar deserts. There was both large (known as megafauna) as well as medium-sized animals like deer, dire wolves and peccary; as well as smaller creatures like ground sloths. All possessed thick coats of shaggy hair to help shield against cold temperatures.

Dire Wolves

Dire wolves (Canis dirus), long before appearing as semi-mystical characters in Game of Thrones or becoming the focus of an iconic Grateful Dead song, captured people’s attention. These massive carnivores roamed wide swaths of North and South America feeding on extinct megafauna preying upon extinct megafauna; larger than modern gray wolves weighing 150+ pounds each.

Before recently, fossil and skeletal evidence led researchers to believe that dire wolves descended from an Asian ancestor which crossed over the Bering Land Bridge into North America around 1 million years ago. Now however, well-preserved DNA evidence is completely changing this narrative.

New research published in Nature shows that dire wolves had more in common with modern jackals than with modern wolves or coyotes, suggesting convergent evolution – in which similar body shapes arise among populations sharing environments – is part of normal evolutionary process.

Bears

As well as giant beasts like woolly mammoths and mastodons, the Ice Age saw many other predators such as grizzly bears, scimitar cats and small predators such as scimitar cats roaming treeless plains of Beringia such as bison herds grazing freely on treeless plains.

An exquisitely preserved cave bear fossil found in Northern Russia is the first ever of its kind with soft tissues intact, providing scientists with unprecedented access to this extinct animal’s anatomy and altering theories about what caused their mass extinction during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition.

Scientists suspect climatic change, human invasion with sharp weapons and disease spread by animals were key contributors in quickly killing off many large animal species. Yet some of those species that went extinct still survive today – like polar bears, brown bears and coyotes. Their genomes serve as an inspiring reminder that there can still be strategies for survival despite challenges; one such animal was identified genetically as being part of the 3c clade between 50-3500 years BCE (Barnes et al. 2002).