Animals weighing more than 100 pounds when alive. The Mammoth, Mastodon, Giant sloth, and Short-faced cave bear would have been megafauna.
all animals weighing more than 100 pounds
The large animals (mammals and flightless birds) that existed in the Quaternary and, in many cases, became extinct at the end of the last ice age (about 10,000 years ago).
The largest arbitrary size categorization of animals in a community, e.g. 20 mm body width in soil invertebrates.
Large vertebrate animals, especially those that went extinct during the Pleistocene, such as giant lemurs, elephant birds, mammoths, mastodons, sabretooth tigers, and ground sloths.
Referring to large animals, such as caribou, bison, bear, and moose.
Large, motile bottom-dwelling animals such as Blue Crabs and flat fish.
refers to animals greater than 20 cm in size. Megafauna are found in the benthos as well as open water.
Animals that are visible to the naked eye
Benthic organisms that are generally larger than 2.0 cm. In contrast to smaller categories of benthic organisms (i.e., macrofauna, meiofauna, and microfauna), megafauna can be easily seen with the naked eye.
Animals large enough to see with the unaided eye. Antonym: microfauna.
Large beast, now extinct that roamed Alabama after the last ice age; examples include giant bison, mastodon, wolley mammoth, giant ground sloth, and peccary.
Animals exceeding 2 cm in length.
Megafauna are generally defined as animals that weigh over 500 kg to 1 tonne, i.e., any animal larger than the largest widespread domestic animal, the domestic bull. Some authors use much lower thresholds, even as low as 50 kg (making humans a megafauna species), but they are not widely accepted. The term is also used to refer to particular groups of large animals, both to extant species and, more often, those that have become extinct in geologically recent times.