Wiktionary
n. 1 The large animals of a given region or time, considered as a group. 2 A treatise on such a group of large animals.
Wikipedia
In terrestrial zoology, megafauna ( Ancient Greek mégalo "large" + New Latin fauna "animal") are large or giant animals. The most common thresholds used are weight over , over , or over a metric ton . This includes many species not popularly thought of as overly large, such as white-tailed deer, red kangaroo, and humans.
In practice, the most common usage encountered in academic and popular writing describes land mammals roughly larger than a human that are not (solely) domesticated. The term is especially associated with the Pleistocene megafauna – the land animals often larger than modern counterparts considered archetypical of the last ice age, such as mammoths, the majority of which in northern Eurasia, the Americas and Australia became extinct as recently as 10,000–40,000 years ago. It is also commonly used for the largest extant wild land animals, especially elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and large bovines. Megafauna may be subcategorized by their trophic position into megaherbivores (e.g., elk), megacarnivores (e.g., lions), and, more rarely, megaomnivores (e.g., bears).
Other common uses are for giant aquatic species, especially whales, any larger wild or domesticated land animals such as larger antelope and cattle, as well as numerous dinosaurs and other extinct giant reptilians.
The term is also sometimes applied to animals (usually extinct) of great size relative to a more common or surviving type of the animal, for example the dragonflies of the Carboniferous period.
A giant animal in mythology is unusually large, either for their species or in relation to humans. The term giant carries some ambiguity, however in mythology definitions of what constitutes 'large' vary, with definitions ranging from 40 kg to 250 kg. At the upper, they may be further subdivided into small (250–500 kg), medium (500–1,000 kg) and large (over 1,000 kg). Megafauna often form one of the mythemes of a story. The narrative may revolve around a real animal or a primordial archetype of a gigantic creature, such as a dragon or the Midgard snake.
Megafauna refers to living or extinct large or giant animals
'''Megafauna ''' may also refer to:
- Megafauna (band) - an American rock band
- Megafauna (mythology) - giant animals in mythological contexts
- Macrobenthos - naked-eye visible bottom-dwelling animals
Usage examples of "megafauna".
One of the most spectacular pre-industrial extinction events was that of the Pleistocene megafauna -- the saber-toothed cats, mammoths, dire wolves, giant ground sloths, glyptodonts, and all those other animals familiar from museum dioramas.
The development of New Guinea highland agriculture must have triggered a big population explosion thousands of years ago, because the highlands could have supported only very low population densities of hunter-gatherers after New Guinea's original megafauna of giant marsupials had been exterminated.