Nearly one million years ago, hypercarnivores roamed the Earth, feasting on prehistoric mammals like wooly mammoths and mastodons and keeping the planet’s ecosystems in check.
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It has always been a question for scientists: how would these cave hyenas and saber-toothed tigers tackle such incredibly huge beasts like mammoths, mastodons, and giants sloths?
When the largest modern-day plant-eaters – elephants – are confined to too small an area, they devastate the vegetation. This helped keep the populations of giant herbivores in check.
Because there is no way to infer from the scant fossil evidence whether the carnivores hunted in packs, the scientists relied on estimated prey sizes and modeled the capacity of single predators and predators in groups to take them down.
Using several different techniques and data sources, Prof.
To deduce the potential impact of these ancient predators, Valkenburgh and his colleagues analyzed fossil records to gauge size ranges for Pleistocene predators larger than 45 pounds. The largest cave hyenas, their research suggests, could have brought down a young, 5-year-old mastodon (weighing more than a ton).
“Scientists didn’t really understand how much bigger a few of these Pleistocene predators were than modern ones”, Van Valkenburgh told Live Science.
Study researchers got the idea of the Pleistocene predators through previous research.
Blaire Van Valkenburgh, lead author of the study, said that by comparing data on modern lion kills of elephants to their ancient counterparts, the hypercarnivores during the Pleistocene era had probably formed larger packs than the prides today.
Professor Louise Roth, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University, North Carolina, said: “From the present day it seems that big animals like elephants are immune to predation”.
“Larger pack sizes, which may have been more common in the Pleistocene, further enhance hunting success”, Prof. Well-established formulas allow scientists to make a reasonable estimate of an animal’s size based on just the first molar.
The paper published in journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the extinction of the largest of the “hyper-carnivores” (such as lions, sabertooth cats and hyenas) during the late Pleistocene nearly certainly was caused by the disappearance of their preferred prey, including young mega-herbivores (the mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths).
The researchers concluded that juvenile mastodons and mammoths would have been prey for many ancient hypercarnivores, especially those that hunted in groups. They knew that these ferocious animals including the cave hyena and saber-toothed cat fed on mega-herbivores, but they didn’t know how large they were.
In today’s ecosystems, large carnivores’ carcasses provide food for smaller animals.
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Researchers also assessed 50,000 instances of kills in the wild to estimate the maximum and typical sizes of the Pleistocene carnivores’ preys. It is also being said that predators might have an indirect effect on river ecosystems as well.
