Once There Were Giants : The Past, Present and Future of Megafauna

Nature demands giants. Megafauna crop up in every era, from the Dreadnoughtus of the Cretaceous period to the more recently extinct woolly mammoth. And everywhere these giant creatures went, they shaped the world around them, simply by existing.This book will tell the story of megafauna on Earth; how big were they really? What did they eat? What ate them? And what might it have been like for our earliest ancestors to exist alongside them?There are vanishingly few megafauna present on earth today. But until very recently, every chain in the biosphere was held together by these immense beasts. Chantal Lyons explores the natural history of these species that most of us don''t even know we''re missing, introduces the surprising species that have crowded in to fill the gaps left behind, and imagines what the future could hold if humans are able to embrace megafauna once more.