Let’s not believe the fairy tales! What did Ice Age animals really look like?

In the wave of climate change discussion, it’s worth recalling that it was the great global warming that made it before ca. 10 thousand. years The impressive mammals of the last Ice Age became extinct on Earth. We owe the image of them mainly to popular animated cartoons starring a voracious squirrel. However, as a growing number of scientific studies indicate, they are often far from historical realities.

Saber-toothed tiger – not as scary as they paint it

One of the greatest heroes of the Ice Age – both fairy tale and paleontological – was the saber-toothed tiger. It’s worth clarifying at the outset that the nomenclature is wrong, for smilodons and their cousins, although they were mammals of the cat family, had nothing in common with today’s tigers. Hundreds of thousands of their bones have been found in California, and based on these finds, a number of theories have been advanced about the appearance and behavior of Pleistocene predators.

Sabretooths, unlike most modern wild cats, lived in herds and helped each other. They were shorter than lions, but up to twice as heavy, so they did not chase game, but attacked from hiding. They also had short tails, and their famous tusks still cause debate today. In light of a study published in 2022. in the journal Quatenary Science Reviews, smilodon actually had protruding tusks, but in other species, including Homotherium latidens, they were surrounded by soft tissue and obscured by the lower lips. An even more recent study from 2024 suggests that smilodon retained milk teeth in the jaw as a support to reduce the risk of fracture of slowly developing tusks.

Underweight sloth, late squirrel

In the famous Ice Age fable, we are also introduced to the ground sloth, inspired by the extinct Megalonyx species. And in this case, too, popular imagery differs from reality. In reality, the sloths of the time were gigantic – they measured up to 3 meters in height and weighed up to more than 1,000 kg. They inhabited the Americas, feeding on vegetation harvested from trees thanks to their massive lower limbs and extremely long claws. Their bodies were most likely covered with thick fur.

Another fabulous inaccuracy is the saber-toothed squirrel, which lived… 38 to 34 million years ago, so millions of years before woolly mammoths, giant sloths and smilodons. The species named by scientists Douglassciurus jeffersoni had a predilection not for acorns, but walnuts, as findings from the US state of Oregon indicate. Even earlier, before about 99-96 million years ago, toothed squirrels Cronopio dentiacutuslived in the area of present-day Argentina, which, according to scientists, most closely resembled the fairy-tale Scrat, but whose 20-centimeter-long tusks were reportedly used to catch insects. At the time of the last Ice Age, squirrels did live in the world, but they were not significantly different from the ones we know today.

Other animals of the last ice age

Lasting approx. 100,000. years the last ice age went down in history as the era of large mammals, which unfortunately did not cope with climate change. They were most likely also helped by man and his increasingly improved hunting techniques. It’s hard not to see this scenario or repeating itself.

In addition to woolly mammoths, which were well protected from winter, the world was traversed, for example, by cave bears(Ursus spelaeus) weighing up to 500 kg and having extremely small brains, massive dire wolves (Canis dirus), which were depicted quite well in the Game of Thrones series, and giant deer(Megaloceros giganteus) with antlers larger than any mammal living on Earth, up to 3.65 m wide. Even the beavers of the time(Castoroides) were gigantic – 2.2 m long and weighing up to 125 kg, they were more like today’s capybaras, and were probably unable to build dams, although they lived in an aquatic environment.

Nor did our close cousins, the Neanderthals, survive the Ice Age. According to a fairly recent study published by Princeton University scientists, for up to 200,000 years they interacted with modern Homo sapiens, but did not emerge victorious. They were not at all as mentally backward as they are said to be today – we know that they were skillful at hunting, making tools and were able to adapt perfectly to harsh winters. Before 30,000. years ago, however, they disappeared from the face of the Earth, making way for… us. It’s hard not to ask what the world would look like today if things had happened differently.

Photo. main: generated AI