I guess the old mythologies of battling giant monsters must be true! Heh, wouldn't wanna come across THAT thing. - N
Sabretooths were smaller than this. Tigers can attack elephants, but it's a tough battle. I don't know how often it happens. They can't slash that thick hide with their claws, all they can do is hang on and bite, while the much more powerful elephant rolls over on them and stomps them. I don't know if sabretooths were pack hunters, that would probably give them the advantage since this animal is nowhere near as large as an elephant. A ten-foot-tall bird is really no match for a ten-foot-long mammal, no matter how well-armed the bird and how poorly-armed the mammal. I doubt that those specialized wing-blades could cut through such thick hide, and the rodent probably outweighed it by a factor of five or six. If the birds were pack-hunters, then that might be a different story. There are no flightless predatory modern birds to judge it by. Well sure, if we have archetypal instinctive memories that go back millions of years, before our own species arose. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! If you're talking about the rodent and not the bird, the article states that it was a grazer, not a hunter. The drawing makes it look like nothing more than an overgrown capybara. I've seen them, just gigantic gophers. They're harmless. A capybara got loose on the Marine base in southern California about twenty years ago--nobody knows where it came from, there aren't that many in zoos and they were all accounted for. It was rather embarrassing, it took the Marines about a month to find it--on their own territory. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Hum, While i didn't consider phorusrhacids to be a predator, (though perhaps a larger as yet undiscovered subspecies did), i can envision that a ambush predator such as the sabre toothed tiger (and similar marsupial sabre toothed predators that they replaced) could. Their hunt method perhaps delivers a slashing bite to the throat; so death is by blood loss. The alternative i guess is crocodylidae or giant snake. But i dont know about these things - i am just speculating.
Hum, well it could be that as an adult it had no predators. Perhaps that was one reason why it grew so big.
Only the largest specimens of the largest species of bears (e.g., grizzlies and polar bears) get anywhere near that big. Most of them don't get a whole lot larger than the largest (reasonably healthy) humans. And they don't have the same diet at all. Bears are carnivores. They're also capable of being omnivorous, eating fruits, insects, and our garbage, but they're opportunistic hunters and happily kill and eat other animals when they're not raiding your pantry. The article makes it clear that this animal was strictly herbivorous. If you ran into one of these animals in the woods it would probably size you up to see if you were a threat and, if not, ignore you. If you run into a bear you could have a really big problem. I can't find anything on the history of the bovines, the subfamily of ten species of ruminants (multi-stomached cud-chewing grazers) widely used for food, including the ones that have been domesticated: cattle, yaks, water buffalo and (lately) bison. If you mean "prehistoric" literally, then sure, most of these species must have been around for at least a couple of million years just like us. But the entire family of bovids (don't you just love the creative terminology of biologists?) goes back twenty million years. That includes the bovines, sheep, goats, antelopes, gazelles, wildebeest, and a few others that you'll probably only see in the zoo or on a nature program. Bovids are only one family within the order of artiodactyls, or hooved mammals with an even number of toes. Other familiar ones include the families of pigs, camels (and llamas), deer, giraffes, hippopotami, peccaries, pronghorns, and... ta-da... something we've just learned in the past couple of years from DNA analysis: the cetaceans. Apparently their ancestors were primitive hippos who swam all the way to the end of the river and longed to keep going, having figured out that warm-blooded air-breathing animals absolutely rule aquatic environments. Somewhere along the way they lost their hooves (including their hind legs and even their pelvis except for a few unattached vestigial bone fragments), but they're still artiodactyls.
