Not just giant beavers, there were all kinds of giant animals before humans arrived. Great sloths, mastodons, etc. etc. New Zealand had these huge birds, Moa, there are sites where they've found piles of bones and fireplaces obviously made for eating Moa, which went extinct quite soon after humans arrived.
QUICK: Name the animal whose industry is most visible from space.
Day or night?
That was a trick question. Day.
Easy. The Beaver. If it were not for beavers evolving beside us, the Eastern US and much of the world would very nearly resemble the driest American Southwest of today, with rain being gathered after a brief overland wash into deep river gorges, with little water left behind close to surface. Past a certain age of erosion even introducing beavers would not help. Shallow masses of water diverted overland is crucial to sediment distribution and the formation of oxbow lakes. If beavers had arrived late their industry would be slowing rivers already confined by steep gorges and the violence of waters would carry them away and destroy them and their families.
When beavers are gone and what is left is the flaky erosion patterns of human desire the future landscape will be a crap shoot... for humanity could never match the attention and focus of the beaver.
Good Q. Since there are many wetland plant species and willows that are beaverlike you could ask how would they become established in the first place, and how would their growing mass and persistence compare to a beaver's after a catastrophic event? And after all, why does the dry deep-gorge Southwest look like the Southwest anyway? THAT could be the outlier and its depth and dryness would seem the result of a 'jump start in erosion' bestowed over geologic time. I think even the Southwest may have been on course to be as green as the East and would have been -- had it not been for some truly horrific floods that eclipse anything in the modern era when the plugs for Glacial Lake Missoula and Bonneville gave way.
Drainage paths in the West ( https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/10/21/16/3995911F000005... ) were more narrow and violent, the same in the East were not. A minimum of sudden deep erosion and therefore sideways diversion of blocked watercourses would be necessary for beavers to get established and shape the landscape so in the East they did. Other places in the world like the Amazon may have been shaped by vegetation impeding erosion more so than gnawing creatures.
> If it were not for beavers evolving beside us, the Eastern US and much of the world would very nearly resemble the driest American Southwest of today, with rain being gathered after a brief overland wash into deep river gorges, with little water left behind close to surface.
The rainfall patterns are very different in those two areas. I don't doubt that beavers have important erosion and sediment retention impacts that over time do have a massive impact on the ecosystem and landscape. However, sediment rention is far from only reason why the american SW looks so different from other parts of the country.
In the middle ages there was a big debate in the Catholic church about whether beavers were fish (nobility hated eating no meat except fish on fridays and were looking for some variety).
It was argued that their tails are scaly like a fish', and of course they live in water. But on the other hand there's all the fur and so on.
So eventually it was decided that beaver tails count as fish, not the whole animal.
This led to it being hunted to local extinction in quite some places.
Beaver is genuinely delicious, and I don't like most game meat. In frontier times it was commonly used as a ready substitute for fatty pork like bacon.
These days you are unlikely to have a chance to try it unless you are friends with a trapper.
They say it "could have weighed up to 200 pounds". How do they know? Are they just guestimating based on modern animals about the same size? Or maybe weighing/measuring a modern beaver and scaling up size and weight?
There's some debate over how useful this is for dinosaurs, but something that died out 10k years ago with closely related existing species is probably easier.
“So, the first inhabitants in this land would have been encountering the giant beaver.”
...and killing them.
It's curious how megafauna extinctions coincide with human arrival... Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and other "First Peoples" were just as deadly as later European settlers.
> It's curious how megafauna extinctions coincide with human arrival... Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and other "First Peoples" were just as deadly as later European settlers.
That's one possible, maybe even likely scenario.
But humans started moving around at that time for a non-human reason; the end of the Ice Age. There's some evidence for populations of large mammals dying out before humans are believed to have showed up in those places, like Australia.
(As with most changes of this magnitude, the true answer is probably "more than one thing".)
Also, we tend to think of human effects and the change in climate to be mutually exclusive, but even if the end of the ice age had zero effect on the ability of megafauna to eat or reproduce, and an increase predation from the introduction of humans was the sole cause of their extinction, the presence of those humans itself would be an effect of the ice age ending.
A generic image-generator can't do the necessary math for relative heights and perspective, and since conveying that information accurately is the entire point of the visualization... :/
The problem is not that people will think they still exist in the wild today. The problem is one can't trust the "size reference" an AI made up out of whole cloth.
Not just giant beavers, there were all kinds of giant animals before humans arrived. Great sloths, mastodons, etc. etc. New Zealand had these huge birds, Moa, there are sites where they've found piles of bones and fireplaces obviously made for eating Moa, which went extinct quite soon after humans arrived.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Extinction:_An_Unn... is a pretty fun read about how we've destroyed everything in our path.
They all had a fatal flaw: they were tasty and slow.
the Houston Museum of Natural Science has a Eremotherium (giant ground sloth) on display -- I'd hate to have one of these guys invade a campsite!
https://blog.hmns.org/2017/04/the-founding-father-and-the-fi...
QUICK: Name the animal whose industry is most visible from space.
Day or night?
That was a trick question. Day.
Easy. The Beaver. If it were not for beavers evolving beside us, the Eastern US and much of the world would very nearly resemble the driest American Southwest of today, with rain being gathered after a brief overland wash into deep river gorges, with little water left behind close to surface. Past a certain age of erosion even introducing beavers would not help. Shallow masses of water diverted overland is crucial to sediment distribution and the formation of oxbow lakes. If beavers had arrived late their industry would be slowing rivers already confined by steep gorges and the violence of waters would carry them away and destroy them and their families.
When beavers are gone and what is left is the flaky erosion patterns of human desire the future landscape will be a crap shoot... for humanity could never match the attention and focus of the beaver.
Beavers are only endemic to North America and parts of Europe. So why does the rest of the world not overwhelmingly resemble the American southwest?
Good Q. Since there are many wetland plant species and willows that are beaverlike you could ask how would they become established in the first place, and how would their growing mass and persistence compare to a beaver's after a catastrophic event? And after all, why does the dry deep-gorge Southwest look like the Southwest anyway? THAT could be the outlier and its depth and dryness would seem the result of a 'jump start in erosion' bestowed over geologic time. I think even the Southwest may have been on course to be as green as the East and would have been -- had it not been for some truly horrific floods that eclipse anything in the modern era when the plugs for Glacial Lake Missoula and Bonneville gave way.
Drainage paths in the West ( https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/10/21/16/3995911F000005... ) were more narrow and violent, the same in the East were not. A minimum of sudden deep erosion and therefore sideways diversion of blocked watercourses would be necessary for beavers to get established and shape the landscape so in the East they did. Other places in the world like the Amazon may have been shaped by vegetation impeding erosion more so than gnawing creatures.
> If it were not for beavers evolving beside us, the Eastern US and much of the world would very nearly resemble the driest American Southwest of today, with rain being gathered after a brief overland wash into deep river gorges, with little water left behind close to surface.
The rainfall patterns are very different in those two areas. I don't doubt that beavers have important erosion and sediment retention impacts that over time do have a massive impact on the ecosystem and landscape. However, sediment rention is far from only reason why the american SW looks so different from other parts of the country.
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I wonder if they were tasty. You never hear of people eating beaver.
In the middle ages there was a big debate in the Catholic church about whether beavers were fish (nobility hated eating no meat except fish on fridays and were looking for some variety).
It was argued that their tails are scaly like a fish', and of course they live in water. But on the other hand there's all the fur and so on.
So eventually it was decided that beaver tails count as fish, not the whole animal.
This led to it being hunted to local extinction in quite some places.
And now we have two questions:
- How does beaver taste?
- How does beaver tail taste?
I don't know about beavers, but their tails tastes like any other fried dough drizzled in syrup.
Beaver tails taste a lot like bear claws.
and 3rd question : does beaver tail taste anywhere close to beaver tail (the pastry) https://beavertails.com/products
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Beaver is genuinely delicious, and I don't like most game meat. In frontier times it was commonly used as a ready substitute for fatty pork like bacon.
These days you are unlikely to have a chance to try it unless you are friends with a trapper.
clearly slang evolves over time
Well, initially, beaver ate you.
The fifth grader in me chuckled.
Not beaver, but muskrat was historically was a Catholic loophole to get around abstinence from meat (and more likely due to food availability).
https://www.detroitcatholic.com/news/the-history-of-detroit-...
And more recently, alligator
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2013/02/alligator-is...
I have a cousin who is a trapper who says they are delicious.
It is an acquired taste.
They say it "could have weighed up to 200 pounds". How do they know? Are they just guestimating based on modern animals about the same size? Or maybe weighing/measuring a modern beaver and scaling up size and weight?
It's not perfect, but there's a very close correlation to the size of the femur with overall body mass in modern animals we use to extrapolate.
See the chart in https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dinosaur.html
There's some debate over how useful this is for dinosaurs, but something that died out 10k years ago with closely related existing species is probably easier.
Allometry, its a whole field of study.
It's 2025, chatgpt confidently told them the answer
I wonder how similar their diet was to modern beavers, especially if they also ate bark and cambium?
A conibear #330 isn't going to even dent that. I'd need a #3300 and farm jack to set it.
This could imply trees were larger back then.
But were they dangerous?
I knew the movie Hundreds of Beavers was a documentary
Mandatory reference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvWfbIe4X_4
I thought this was going to be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYDfwUJzYQg
... as opposed to the bear-sized tiny beavers?
“So, the first inhabitants in this land would have been encountering the giant beaver.”
...and killing them.
It's curious how megafauna extinctions coincide with human arrival... Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and other "First Peoples" were just as deadly as later European settlers.
The Once and Future World by J.B. MacKinnon eloquently describes our disastrous impact on Nature: https://www.jbmackinnon.ca/the-once-and-future-world
> It's curious how megafauna extinctions coincide with human arrival... Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and other "First Peoples" were just as deadly as later European settlers.
That's one possible, maybe even likely scenario.
But humans started moving around at that time for a non-human reason; the end of the Ice Age. There's some evidence for populations of large mammals dying out before humans are believed to have showed up in those places, like Australia.
(As with most changes of this magnitude, the true answer is probably "more than one thing".)
Also, we tend to think of human effects and the change in climate to be mutually exclusive, but even if the end of the ice age had zero effect on the ability of megafauna to eat or reproduce, and an increase predation from the introduction of humans was the sole cause of their extinction, the presence of those humans itself would be an effect of the ice age ending.
These animals survived multiple climate changes before that. Nope, it was humans.
We're the reason the North American continent has _no_ large predators except bears.
Again, it’s probably both.
We humans nearly bought it during the same period; we bottlenecked at ~1,000 individuals for millennia. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487
The other hominins didn’t make it.
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What utility does an AI-generated image with a weirdly proportioned fake human give here?
Real images abound with a quick Google: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/may-25-sharks-on-a-bird-diet... https://www.bellmuseum.umn.edu/blog/meet-the-giant-beaver/ etc.
A generic image-generator can't do the necessary math for relative heights and perspective, and since conveying that information accurately is the entire point of the visualization... :/
So about 2x as big as a normal North American beaver.
They're remarkable animals. The scale of impact of their dam-building on ecosystems is only just starting to be appreciated.
Yep. It is a [Keystone species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species)
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If yo use AI then please say so. I dont want or like fake bullshit shown to me as if genuine.
First off, I'm with you on the "don't try to pass off AI imagery as real"...
But.. OP never claimed these images were real in their post..
Since there are no giant beavers in the world today, we could have assumed they were AI generated?
This could have been an illustration or a 3D render instead.. Isn't AI image generation just another form of visualization, like those?
> Since there are no giant beavers in the world today, we could have assumed they were AI generated?
Both depict what are clearly supposed to be museum exhibits. Those exist: https://www.bellmuseum.umn.edu/blog/meet-the-giant-beaver/
The problem is not that people will think they still exist in the wild today. The problem is one can't trust the "size reference" an AI made up out of whole cloth.