Today, is the Fall of the Great Titan. At age 50, Tim, one of Africa's last great tuskers, has come to his end -- and with him, the legacy of one of Earth's greatest creatures to ever roam. Rest in Peace, to a Giant.

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The bison is perhaps last of the ice age giants. As big as a ton, they are the largest animals of the north - remnants of a time when mammoths roamed. Most megafauna outside the old world tropics died ~10kya. It's posited that de-extinction could bring back the biodiversity & ecology from this time.

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The eastern gorilla is the largest primate, & can weigh 450lbs+. They have massive builds with enormous strength, which they use to forage on strong plants, plow through the dense forest, and dominate opposition. These mountain gorillas are adapted to high altitudes, with a thick coat.

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This, is the first and only elephantine depiction by prehistoric natives in North America. Based upon its location, it is either a Columbian mammoth or an American mastodon, and its high shoulder suggests it is a mammoth. It was not very long ago when these giants thundered the great plains.

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The cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) was a massive European relative of the brown bear. It was likewise very heavily built, but was more herbivorous in diet. It died sooner than other megafauna - likely due to more specialized diet and behavior - but interbred with brown bears, & their DNA carries on.

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Bears are built for brute strength. The most robust large carnivorans, they have sturdy builds w/ heavy musculature, & strong, flexible forelimbs. This strength is an adaptation for generalist foraging; digging, removing obstacles, subduing prey - opting for adaptability over specialized predation.

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🔥 Black panthers are the recessive, melanistic variety of leopards or jaguars. Black panthers are most numerous in dense jungle where they have a selective advantage for stalking prey in the deep, dark forest, whereby their black coats fade them into the obscurity of the night.

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The white rhinoceros is an ecological engineer. By acting as lawn mowers, these megagrazers create & maintain short grass plains that many other grazers depend on, & are also resistant to wildfire. Large numbers of smaller grazers cannot fill such a role as they do not graze grasses short enough.

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Cheetahs are the most adaptively divergent of all cats. Cheetahs are highly cursorial: they've specialized their traits for running, and thus do not resemble cats physically. Small & round heads, long limbs w/ only semi-retractable claws, & lithe bodies; they resemble other cats only superficially.

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Under the overkill hypothesis, the Pleistocene extinction event never truly ceased, w/ humans eliminating species as far back as 45,000 BP and never letting up. The Northern white rhino was found to likely be a distinct species -- not soon enough, unfortunately, for them to be saved from extinction.

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Machrauchenia is often shown w/ a proboscis, due to its nostrils placed high on the skull. This is unlikely; its skull has no attachment point for such muscles, & as its long neck could reach for high leaves, a 'trunk' would be redundant. Perhaps its nostrils' purpose was to be kept out of forage.

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The Hippopotamus is Africa's river giant. Known for their bad tempers, hippos can weigh 5,000lbs, & are characterized by very robust, barrel-like bodies, huge heads, but short legs. This makes them poor swimmers. Their trampling through marsh and wetland makes them keystone riparian megaherbivores.

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The aurochs was a large, ecologically important wild bovid that had an expansive range across Afro-Eurasia -- and was the ancestor of our domestic cattle. Because of this, its genetic material exists, and numerous programs are working to back-breed the species by selecting for its genotype.

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Tapirs are very weird. Nocturnal browsers, their long proboscis is used in feeding whereby they pull plants to their mouth. They can be aquatic, & may spend much of their day wallowing in lagoons. The prehistoric beasts, of which there are 5 species, have remained largely unchanged for >30M years.

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Polar bears rely on a fat-rich diet of marine mammals to survive the Arctic. Their ability to store fat insulates them from the cold, prevents starvation & provides buoyancy for swimming. While this bulk compromises agility/endurance, they use their brute strength to haul seals from beneath the ice.

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The puma is a fierce predator, with an athletic and muscular body to pounce up to 30ft upon unfortunate prey, which varies across its range. Pumas are highly adaptable cats. This puma pouncing upon a guanaco (a camelid) is prehistoric scene of big cats and camels dating back to the Pleistocene.

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Africa is nature's greatest kingdom of predators; the savannah has the most large carnivores on Earth. Competition is fierce, & all are kleptoparasites. A leopard and a hyena are near equal; hyenas are 50% larger than wolves and built like small bears, but the big cat is nature's ultimate predator.

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Painted dogs are tactical hunters. They are well suited to cursorial pack hunting, with long legs and an athletic body. To take down large prey, the pack will tire it out, then surround it & use their agility overwhelm the prey while inflicting serious damage by snapping their long, powerful jaws.

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The Pleistocene was a time of giants. Before their mysterious vanishing, the megafauna were in abundance similar to the African savannah today. A mosaic of steppe & taiga was a complex ecosystem; one supported by its keystone species, the woolly mammoth, whose size opened habitat for other species.

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Elephants are perfectly adapted to being megaherbivores. Their column-like limbs are directly underneath them to support their mass. Their trunk is key: its length & ability for powerful coiling/twisting allows elephants to maximize their feeding envelope and skillfully manipulate their environment.

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The black rhino and white rhino are the two African rhinos. The black rhino is a browser, with longer legs & higher head, using his prehensile lip to grasp leaves. The white rhino is a grazer with a low body & wide lip to mow grasses. The black rhino is 3000lbs+; the larger white rhino is 5,000lbs+.

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The Northern white rhinoceros - through genetic research - shown to be a distinct, 6th species of rhino, not only a subspecies of white rhino. This, however, was not enough to save them from looming extinction. The last male, Sudan, died in 2018.

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The giant forest hog -- unknown to most -- is the largest species of wild pig. Attaining weights of up to 300kg, they use their massive heads and curved tusks to omnivorously forage on the forest floor. They are mostly nocturnal, & prefer the cover of the dense Congo rainforest to open savannah.

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The King of Paradise - an male Okavango lion. There are only two subspecies of lion, but there are many ecotypes all with their own characterists and adaptations to their environment. Okavango lions are speculated to be some of the biggest, with their rich diet of large herbivores found year round.

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The Northern Sumatran rhino was the mainland subspecies of the extant but critically endangered Sumatran rhino. The most widepsread Asian rhinos, they lived from India to China & were highly culturally important. They were distinct, being much larger, & w/ longer horns. Few may persist in Myanmar.

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Rhinoceros' horns are long, keratinous structures whose purpose is primarly for use in intraspecific conflicts though they also are anti-predatory and used in foraging. In the Indian/Javan rhinos, the horn is reduced and large lower canines have developed for use against rivals.

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Giant short-faced bears were probably omnivorous, opportunistic foragers. Their molarized cheek teeth imply they consumed vegetation, & given their more gracile limbs they probably relied upon browsing morso than excavation. Short jaws among Tremarctinae may be adapted to consuming tough vegetation.

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The extinction of almost all interspecific competition for grassland habitat (mammoths, horses, camels) & the loss of their primary predator, the American lion, allowed the surviving bison to proliferate greatly & for the species to become the dominant large herbivores of Holocene North America.

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🔥 Melanistic Zebra

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The Quagga was a plains zebra spp. native to the African cape. It had a brown body & white limbs, w/ white stripes on the head and neck; this is merely blending of the dark brown and white coat plains zebras have. The Quagga Project is artificially selecting zebras to breed this animal back to life.

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A paleolithic engraving from Spain, likely depicting Stephanorhinus hemitoechus. While the genus is usually regarded as an interglacial taxon, they survived during glacials in southern refugium. They may have become extinct at the Last Glacial Maximum, 29-19 ka.

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🔥 Reticulated Giraffes 🦒

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