The BIGGEST Animals That Existed Alongside Humans

for a long time dinosaurs have captured the imagination of humans and they hold a special place in our culture this is evident with the massively popular Jurassic Park film franchise at the bedroom of any 5-year-old so what's the appeal well they were big and scary but is it really that scary to imagine their existence they went extinct a long time before humans even entered the picture no human ever looked up at a dinosaur and said uh-oh unless a museum exhibit was about to fall down on top of

them so today I'll be looking at the big animals that did exist alongside humans with a few vague guidelines firstly they have to be extinct so while the blue whale is thought to be the largest known animal to ever exist they're still around also no creatures that are survived by similar animals of a similar size mastadons and mammoths are cool but even the massive step Mammoth wasn't that much bigger than a modern elephant no dire wolves because they were about the same size as a modern grey wo

lf we want animals that are kind of hard to imagine that makes them more interesting in my opinion I'm also looking for creatures that humans actually had a decent chance of coming across if there were some great beast in the deep sea well probably no one ever got a look at the thing I want creatures that humans might have had to put up a fight against or seen off in the distance and thought M let not go over there I put the creatures on a scale beside this human for reference who is 6t actually

you know what in the interests of combating unobtainable male beauty standards we'll make them five 11 ladies it's basically the same thing now without further bring out the first animal he's dead diodon were a type of marsupial that lived in Australia marsupial are lovely fellas look at this koala and this wombat aren't marsupial so cute well maybe not when they're the size of a godamn bear the single species of diprotodon is the largest known marsupial to ever exist it inhabited most of Austr

alia coexisting with the first Aboriginal Australians and traveled long distances on legs that were like an elephants they could be as tall as 1.8 m or 5' 11 making him equally as handsome as our perfectly sized male they were about 4 M or 13 ft long and weighed around 2 tons the dioon are notable for their two long front teeth which we think could have produced a bite force of 2,300 Newtons the bite force further into the jaw at the last molers may have been as high as 11,000 Newtons for compar

ison the average human bite is about 300 Newtons if our estimates of Dion's bite force are accurate they had a stronger bite force than polar bears gorillas and even hippos so you wouldn't want this thing nipping at you but as a marsupial it hungered for tree branches not humans the question of how threatening this thing was to humans probably comes down to how Placid it was was it content to just eat plants in peace or was it real territorial we can't say for sure but either way some well well

prepared humans could have taken a lawn diprotodon down although you could probably say that about almost every animal now that I think about it the diprotodon went extinct over 40,000 years ago as one of many species that was wiped out by a meapa Extinction event it's thought that this was the result of changing climates or predatory pressure from humans or a combination of both it's pretty crazy to think a human's eating this thing imagine sitting around the campfire with a giant stake of what

essentially was a big wombat however there isn't much evidence to suggest that humans messed with this thing as we haven't found any fossils with markings that would suggest human Butchery or cooking in 2016 Australian archaeologists found a bone from a young diprotodon in a rock shelter up a sheer Cliff it's unlikely the dioon was able to climb up here by itself and the lack of carnivore damage to the Bone LED researchers to believe it may have been killed by humans and brought to the shelter

for cooking from giant marsupial to giant slots or to be specific giant ground slots all species of ground slots are extinct only tree slots Remain meum americanum the biggest ground slot was endemic to South America and was one of the largest animals in its habitat with a shoulder height of 2.1 M it's thought it would have occasionally stood upright supported by its tail to eat branches and leaves that the other herbivores were too short to reach this would give it a standing height of around 4

M and tery fly fossilized Footprints suggest it sometimes walked upright if that wasn't freaky enough some think that this giant slot's large size and small surface area to volume ratio Would Have Made It susceptible to overheating so maybe it was mostly hairless like modern elephants imagine you're in the woods when it's getting dark and you see this massive hairless freaks standing on two legs off in the distance because it was massive and also a herbivore it existed for millions of years wit

h few enemies un fortunately it was a victim of the same Extinction event that saw the end of the dark proton although we think it went extinct about 12,000 years ago as opposed to the radons 40,000 years ago this Extinction event took place from about 50,000 years ago to about 10,000 years ago so diprotodon was a fairly early adopter of Extinction during this time frame whereas the giant ground slau leftt it fairly late to pop their clogs all over the world these extinctions were occurring roug

hly around the same time early humans were showing up in the area but we don't really know if these massive creatures weren't around because humans showed up to bother them or if humans showed up because these massive creatures weren't around to bother them did we come into an area and kill all the big scary monsters or did we stay away from an area until the big scary monsters were gone who knows what we do know is that unlike diodon there is evidence humans killed and ate giant ground slots th

ere's a photo over there look no the actual evidence is we found bones with cut marks that suggest human Butchery and the remains of a megatherium americanum were found at a kill site that dates back about 12,000 years around the same time the things disappeared for good they killed and ate a sloth the size of an elephant these giant armadillos lived around the same time as the giant ground slot and in the same place South America so there could have been Pals one study suggests the giant ground

slau could have flipped these Fells over and eaten them on occasion but that study doesn't have a lot of support so we'll just imagine the Giant armadillo was friends with the giant slot he would have been friends with everybody though as Predators like saber toot cats coexisted with it and it's thought its hard armor may have provided some protection from them we found fractured glyptodont armor that suggests physical conflict with other animals a bite from a saber toot cat couldn't pierce the

gPad dant's armor but a young glyptodont with developing armor was far more vulnerable there were a few different species of gPad do probably the most interesting is the aurus clavicus which had a spiky Club at the end of a long tail which it probably used in combat clipdot species varied in size with the bigger ones being about 1.5 M tall look at the size of that fell if he fell down a hill you wouldn't want to be at the bottom clipto dance went extinct around 10,000 years ago during the same

Extinction event that took out the other two this Extinction event is a reoccurring ing thing because as I said earlier this period saw a lot of species of megap go extinct and unlike a lot of other extinctions that's all ecological successors there wasn't much replacement of the meapa after this event a lot of meapa are just gone for good this period represents a collapse in animal density and diversity across the world and humans maybe played a role in this event maybe quite a large role there

is evidence that humans hunted glyptodon Jesus fre will eat anything zero unab bangas given and it speculated that we may have used their shells as shelters from the rain these giant apes are taugh to be close relatives of orangutans unfortunately we don't know for sure how big these Apes actually were because we've only ever found their teeth and mandibles it's not the reason for this is because the skeletons of these fellas were usually consumed by porcupines before they had a chance to fossi

lize as far as we aware there was only one species of gigantopithecus gigantopithecus black eye there's only so much you can estimate from jawbones and teeth about the overall size of a creature so the size of gigantopithecus black eye is highly speculative but based on the proportions of orangutans we estimate they may have been around 3 m tall when standing upright now before I put that on the scale let's put a gorilla as you can see the scale doesn't really do justice to how big we perceive g

orilla is to be if you've never seen a gorilla before this scale might give you the mistaken idea that you could take one of these in a fight okay now put giganto picus black eye imagine being a human seeing this fellow for the first time I say a human but it's very unlikely Homo sapiens ever encountered this Beast it lived in Southeast Asia and went extinct about 2 or 300,000 years ago but there's evidence Homo erectus was banging around the area at least 800,000 years ago but didn't become pre

valent until after gigantopithecus black eye went extinct we don't know if Homo erectus and gigantopithecus black eye competed for resources or directly challenged each other but it's thought it may have gone extinct as its forest habitat declined with the expansion of grasslands and its diet meant it wasn't able to adapt to this as well as other Apes Forest RDS or Terror birds were large flightless birds who terrifyingly were carnivorous and were among the largest apex predators during their mi

llions of years of existence in South America as a family of birds Forest City contained a bunch of species of all different shapes and sizes they ranged in height from about 1 to 3 m oh no they were very fast Runners probably couldn't perform tight turns at high speeds so they likely only went after bigger prey rather than small agile creatures it thought they used their powerful legs to kick and injure prey then to hold them down while they used their large sharp edged beak to Peck them apart

now I wouldn't want to fight with an ostrich but unlike an ostrich these things probably would have looked at a human and thought I'm going to eat you the good news is we're not really sure Terror Birds existed at the same time in the same place as humans we used to think they went extinct around the same time humans started showing up in the area but now believed that the Giants species went extinct around a million years before humans arrived although some fossils of smaller species of teror b

ird measuring 2 or 3 ft tall have been dated to the last 100,000 years so we think we probably didn't come across the big huge ones but may have seen the last of the smaller runty ones the Megalania was a big old monitor lizards that lived in Australia the largest terrestrial lizards known to have existed however we don't have many remains of this creature and the remains we do have are fragmented so we can only estimate its full size some estimates put Megalania at around 5 m long with higher e

stimates suggesting a size of 7 m long it likely fed on medium to large sized animals including diprotodon and while we don't know for sure its relation to other venomous lizards May imply the Megalania had Venom which would make it the largest venomous vertebrate known to have existed the youngest remains date back to 50,000 years ago beyond that we don't know much about when it existed or when it went extinct although it seems likely it would have been a part of that big Extinction event so th

e early Aboriginal Australians may have played a hand in getting rid of this big with its huge size and possibly venomous bite the Megalania would have been fearsome opponents but it's thought they wouldn't have been able to outrun humans and they certainly didn't Outlast us look at that giant beaver castoroides were about 2 m long making them the largest known beavers you might reasonably assume that these Fells were making some giant dams and having a huge impact on their environment but there

's no evidence they constructed dams and the shape of their teeth would have made them much less effective at cutting down trees than the little beavers we have now their rounded teeth were adapted for chewing on aquatic vegetation rather than gnawing on wood that doesn't mean they didn't make dams alter waterways we just don't know they lived across most of North America and went extinct about 10,000 years ago as part of the megaphon extinction event did humans hunt them to Extinction again we

don't know there's no evidence humans butcher them but castoroides remains have been found alongside human artifacts and caves this alongside numerous Native American myths and stories that feature giant beavers would suggest that humans were well familiar with these fellas there's even an an indigenous myth that a colossal Beaver created a huge Dam which resulted in the formation of the Great Lakes these giant kangaroos lived in Australia alongside the kangaroos were're familiar with today alth

ough some species of procoptodon were more than three times the size of living kangaroos with the largest measuring 2.7 M tall due to their immense size hopping around like regular kangaroos would have put terrible strain on their tendons so we think it's more likely they walked like humans at this point you can probably guess when they went extinct we're not sure of the exact date but some evidence indicates it was still around as recently as 18,000 years ago there's no direct evidence of human

hunting but given their large upright stature and Preferred Open environments human Hunters would have spotted these guys a mile off the question is would a human try to go after a kangaroo that was nearly 3 m tall given what we know about the other massive animals humans took on seems reasonably likely so there's a few big animals that actually did live amongst us obviously not an exhaustive list and there were probably other terrifying Giants that we just don't know about it's interesting tha

t so many of these creatures that existed for millions of years beforehand all went extinct in the span of about 40,000 years and in some places like the Americas this occurred in about 3,000 years in the grand scheme of life on Earth that's a pretty short time frame these meapa were basically all wiped out out simultaneously and it wasn't an apocalyptic event like a meteor striking the Earth it was either changing climates or human activity or both while that's been a long running and controver

sial topic of debate I personally would be inclined to believe humans had a lot to do with it it's like we said okay planet Earth being big and strong has been the dominant strategy for a pretty long time and now that time is over all the rest of you better start learning to make tools fast because uh you missed your chance if you're a non-human animal watching this let the mass extinctions of the meapa be a lesson to you we're in charge now and we're not honoring old Arrangements being big and

strong doesn't mean to us so if you want to survive either be intelligent or useful to us being cute is also acceptable if you're a non nonhuman animal watching this AKA a human let me know what you thought about the video what creature scared you the most and why you think it would have been frightening to encounter until next time stay safe we're in ch Church we're in church like humans no no no oh mie recording his stop automatically how I stop with the you ever going to stop doing that autom

atically huh stop