Question

Directly from the book "World Prehistory and Archaeology" by Michael Chazan, What are megafauna? Compare and contrast the extinction of megafauna in North America with that in Australia.

Answer 1

Megafauna mean in Greek "megas "mean "large"

And Latin word" faunas "mean "Animal life"

The term megafauna is very commanly used to discrive invertebrates it has occasionally been used for some species extingtly invertebrates that were much larger than all similar invertebrates species alive today

Example Dragonflies and Clade synepsida

is especially associated with the Pleistocene megafauna – the land animals often larger than modern counterparts considered archetypical of the last ice age, such as mammoths, the majority of which in northern Eurasia, the Americas and Australia became extinct within the last forty thousand years Among living animals.

For hundreds of millions of years,an abundance of largeanimals,the megafauna,was aprominent feature of the land and oceans.However,inthelast few ten s of thousands of years—ablink of aneyeon many evolutionary and biogeochemical time scales—something dramatic happened to Earth’s ecology;megafauna largely disappeared fromvastareas,rendered either actually or functionally extinct(1,2).Only in small parts of the world domegafauna existat diversities anythin g close to their previous state,and,in many of these remaining regions,they are inastate off unctional declin ethrough population depletion andrange contraction.In the oceans,a similar process has occurred over the last few hundred years :although there has been little absolut eextinction, there has been adramatic declinein the abundance of whalesand large fish through over harvesting.Both on land and in oceans,decline scontinue today.