![]() Around the end of the Pleistocene, all these creatures went extinct (the horses living in North America today are all descendants of animals brought from Europe in historic times). Great teratorn birds with 25-foot wingspans stalked prey. Native horses and camels galloped across the plains of North America. Mammoths and their cousins the mastodons, longhorned bison, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, and many other large mammals characterized Pleistocene habitats in North America, Asia, and Europe. ![]() Yet the Pleistocene was also characterized by the presence of distinctive large land mammals and birds. ![]() This mammoth (right), found in deposits in Russia, was one of the largest land mammals of the Pleistocene, the time period that spanned from 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago.* Pleistocene biotas were extremely close to modern ones many genera and even species of Pleistocene conifers, mosses, flowering plants, insects, mollusks, birds, mammals, and others survive to this day. The Pleistocene Epoch Online exhibits : Geologic time scale : Cenozoic Era ![]()
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