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Episode details

World Service,24 May 2002,25 mins

The demise of the big animals

Discovery

Available for over a year

What caused the extinction of some of the world's largest mammals, some 15,000 years ago? Around this time there was a profusion of big animals or megafauna on the Earth. Super-sized kangaroos, bears and cats lived throughout the planet, but within a few hundred years these animals were extinct. Could it have been by disease?

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