[HN Gopher] Bear-Sized Giant Beavers Once Roamed North America
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Bear-Sized Giant Beavers Once Roamed North America
Author : noleary
Score : 36 points
Date : 2025-07-08 00:14 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| flerchin wrote:
| I wonder if they were tasty. You never hear of people eating
| beaver.
| kcplate wrote:
| I have a cousin who is a trapper who says they are delicious.
| yodon wrote:
| clearly slang evolves over time
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Well, initially, beaver ate you.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The fifth grader in me chuckled.
| Scarblac wrote:
| 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.
| gausswho wrote:
| And now we have two questions:
|
| - How does beaver taste?
|
| - How does beaver tail taste?
| mousethatroared wrote:
| I don't know about beavers, but their tails tastes like any
| other fried dough drizzled in syrup.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Beaver tails taste a lot like bear claws.
| condensedcrab wrote:
| 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-...
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| And more recently, alligator
|
| https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2013/02/alligator-
| is...
| Glant wrote:
| 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?
| tokai wrote:
| Allometry, its a whole field of study.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| jboggan wrote:
| A conibear #330 isn't going to even dent that. I'd need a #3300
| and farm jack to set it.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| ... as opposed to the bear-sized tiny beavers?
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| Mandatory reference
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvWfbIe4X_4
| timschmidt wrote:
| I thought this was going to be
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYDfwUJzYQg
| anon84873628 wrote:
| I wonder how similar their diet was to modern beavers, especially
| if they also ate bark and cambium?
| HocusLocus wrote:
| 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.
| _jab wrote:
| 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?
| HocusLocus wrote:
| 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.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > 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.
| fractallyte wrote:
| _"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
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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".)
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| 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...
| cyberax wrote:
| They all had a fatal flaw: they were tasty and slow.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| But were they dangerous?
| bilsbie wrote:
| This could imply trees were larger back then.
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