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Bear-Sized Giant Beavers Once Roamed North America
- codevark 1y ago[dead]
- fcpguru 1y ago[flagged]
- MisterTea 1y agoIf yo use AI then please say so. I dont want or like fake bullshit shown to me as if genuine.
- sbarre 1y agoFirst off, I'm with you on the "don't try to pass off AI imagery as real"... But.. OP never claimed these images were real in their post.. Since there are no giant beavers in the world today, we could have assumed they were AI generated? This could have been an illustration or a 3D render instead.. Isn't AI image generation just another form of visualization, like those?
- ceejayoz 1y ago> Since there are no giant beavers in the world today, we could have assumed they were AI generated? Both depict what are clearly supposed to be museum exhibits. Those exist: https://www.bellmuseum.umn.edu/blog/meet-the-giant-beaver/ https://www.bellmuseum.umn.edu/blog/meet-the-giant-beaver/ The problem is not that people will think they still exist in the wild today. The problem is one can't trust the "size reference" an AI made up out of whole cloth.
- sbarre 1y agoAgain I'm not asserting the validity of the image. Are we expecting everyone to say "this was AI created" on every image that is AI created? We don't expect this from 3D rendering, Photoshop edits, etc..
- ceejayoz 1y ago> Are we expecting everyone to say "this was AI created" on every image that is AI created? Yes. The New York Times, for example, would say something at least like "photo-illustration by <so and so>" or "artist's depiction". It's not just the provenance here, though, that is upsetting. It's this bit that puts it well over the line: > with human for size reference Which implies the graphic is accurate and to scale enough to be used as a "reference". It is not. The human is weirdly proportioned; the beavers have different (amounts and styles) teeth; the AI comes with no scientific understanding of the real creature. It's a guess, based on a prompt unknown to us.
- sbarre 1y agoI hate to break it to you but some random Internet forum like HN is not the New York Times. I think it's ridiculous to expect to hold everyone to the same standards as a globally renowned newspaper that is in the business of trying to authoritatively report the truth and where its existence relies on its credibility (let's leave aside how good/bad they are at it for now). But that's not what happened here, someone just posted AI-generated images to give people a visual interpretation. There was no attempt at science or at credibility or authority here. They could have just drawn those images with a pencil, or MS Paint, instead. > Which implies the graphic is accurate and to scale enough to be used as a "reference". It is not. No, you are implying this. You are bringing your own interpretation here. "Human for reference" is just a thing people do to give a sense of scale, it's common in all kinds of imagery. At this point you're nitpicking and splitting hairs to remain upset/offended. AI imagery is just another kind of visualization, another kind of illustration or artist's rendering to help people imagine a thing alongside words, it's just using different tools.
- retrac 1y agoSo about 2x as big as a normal North American beaver. They're remarkable animals. The scale of impact of their dam-building on ecosystems is only just starting to be appreciated.
- abc_lisper 1y agoYep. It is a [Keystone species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species)
- hdjdk 1y ago[dead]
- ceejayoz 1y agoWhat utility does an AI-generated image with a weirdly proportioned fake human give here? Real images abound with a quick Google: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/may-25-sharks-on-a-bird-diet-fossils-of-fungus-lifelike-machines-and-more-1.5147055/ancient-beavers-as-big-as-bears-died-out-because-of-their-woodless-diet-1.5147062 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/may-25-sharks-on-a-bird-diet... https://www.bellmuseum.umn.edu/blog/meet-the-giant-beaver/ https://www.bellmuseum.umn.edu/blog/meet-the-giant-beaver/ etc.
- Terr_ 1y agoA generic image-generator can't do the necessary math for relative heights and perspective, and since conveying that information accurately is the entire point of the visualization... :/
- flerchin 1y agoI wonder if they were tasty. You never hear of people eating beaver.
- kcplate 1y agoI have a cousin who is a trapper who says they are delicious.
- yodon 1y agoclearly slang evolves over time
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoWell, initially, beaver ate you.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoBeaver 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 1y agoThe fifth grader in me chuckled.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Scarblac 1y agoIn 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.
- Glant 1y agoThey 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 1y agoAllometry, its a whole field of study.
- ceejayoz 1y agoIt'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 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.
- somanyphotons 1y agoIt's 2025, chatgpt confidently told them the answer
- jboggan 1y agoA conibear #330 isn't going to even dent that. I'd need a #3300 and farm jack to set it.
- dtgriscom 1y ago... as opposed to the bear-sized tiny beavers?
- Iwan-Zotow 1y agoMandatory reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvWfbIe4X_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvWfbIe4X_4
- timschmidt 1y agoI thought this was going to be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYDfwUJzYQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYDfwUJzYQg
- anon84873628 1y agoI wonder how similar their diet was to modern beavers, especially if they also ate bark and cambium?
- ceejayoz 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castoroides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castoroides > Stable isotopes suggest that Castoroides probably predominantly consumed submerged aquatic plants, rather than the woody diet of living beavers. There is no evidence that giant beavers constructed dams or lodges. The shape of the incisors of Castoroides would have made it much less effective in cutting down trees than living beavers. It was likely heavily dependent on wetland environments for both food and protection from predators.
- HocusLocus 1y agoQUICK: 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 1y agoBeavers are only endemic to North America and parts of Europe. So why does the rest of the world not overwhelmingly resemble the American southwest?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- HocusLocus 1y agoGood 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/2016/10/21/16/3995911F00000578-0-image-a-10_1477064225642.jpg 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.
- fractallyte 1y ago“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 https://www.jbmackinnon.ca/the-once-and-future-world
- ceejayoz 1y ago> 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".)
- dlcarrier 1y agoAlso, we tend to think of human effects and the change in climate to be mutually exclusive, but even if the end of the ice age had zero effect on the ability of megafauna to eat or reproduce, and an increase predation from the introduction of humans was the sole cause of their extinction, the presence of those humans itself would be an effect of the ice age ending.
- cyberax 1y agoThese animals survived multiple climate changes before that. Nope, it was humans. We're the reason the North American continent has _no_ large predators except bears.
- ceejayoz 1y agoAgain, it’s probably both. We humans nearly bought it during the same period; we bottlenecked at ~1,000 individuals for millennia. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 The other hominins didn’t make it.
- kreyenborgi 1y agoNot 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_Unnatural_History 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 1y agothe 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-ficticious-feline-the-story-of-thomas-jefferson-and-his-mis-identified-sloth/ https://blog.hmns.org/2017/04/the-founding-father-and-the-fi...
- cyberax 1y agoThey all had a fatal flaw: they were tasty and slow.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoYep. The evidence may not be completely conclusive, but I'd bet on the side of humans (plus climate to a degree) as the primary cause of the Quaternary megafauna extinctions in North and South America. Buffalo, passenger pigeons, and old growth forest extents make me think us humans destroy almost everything.
- yieldcrv 1y agoBut were they dangerous?
- bilsbie 1y agoThis could imply trees were larger back then.
- beefnugs 1y agoI knew the movie Hundreds of Beavers was a documentary
- telesilla 1y agoDisappointing there was no picture for scale, here's a good one. https://www.prehistoric-wildlife.com/species/castoroides/ https://www.prehistoric-wildlife.com/species/castoroides/
- ashoeafoot 1y agoReviveable.