One of these is the event’s timing. The megafauna extinction, it’s now clear, did not take place all at once, as Lyell and Wallace believed it had. Rather, it occurred in pulses. The first pulse, about forty thousand years ago, took out Australia’s giants. A second pulse hit North America and South America some twenty-five thousand years later. Madagascar’s giant lemurs, pygmy hippos, and elephant birds survived all the way into the Middle Ages. New Zealand’s moas made it as far as the Renaissance.
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