{"id":24736,"date":"2024-07-04T07:26:09","date_gmt":"2024-07-04T01:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=24736"},"modified":"2025-04-07T12:49:37","modified_gmt":"2025-04-07T07:19:37","slug":"megafauna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/megafauna\/","title":{"rendered":"Megafauna"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>About Megafauna:\u00a0<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>This term is generally used to describe animals <strong>weighing more than 50 kg<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>The term was first used by the English naturalist and explorer <strong>Alfred Russel Wallace<\/strong> in his 1876 book, The Geographical Distribution of Animals.<\/li>\n<li>Megafauna may be classified based on their dietary type as <strong>megaherbivores<\/strong> (plant-eaters), <strong>megacarnivores <\/strong>(meat-eaters), and <strong>megaomnivores <\/strong>(who eat both plants and meat).\n<ul>\n<li>Ostriches are <strong>megaomnivores,<\/strong> with an adult ostrich weighing anywhere between 90 and 140 kg, with height between seven and nine feet.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Historical evidence of Megafauna<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>The earliest documented evidence of the species in the subcontinent was presented by <strong>Richard Lydekker in 1884<\/strong> in <strong>the Dhok Pathan deposits<\/strong> in Upper Siwalik (Sivalik) Hills in present-day Pakistan.<\/li>\n<li>Archaeologist S A Sali in 1989 reported the discovery of ostrich eggshell <strong>beads and engraved pieces<\/strong> (dating back to roughly 50,000\u201340,000 years ago) in an Upper Palaeolithic open-air camping site at <strong>Patne, Maharashtra.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>In 2017, researchers at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad assessed the ages of a batch of <strong>fossilised egg shells<\/strong> from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, and established the presence of ostriches 25,000 years ago.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1: What is the Shiwalik Range?<\/h3>\n<p>Shivalik Hills are a sub-Himalayan Mountain Range running 1,600 km long from the Teesta River, Sikkim, through Nepal and India, into northern Pakistan.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/explained\/discovery-prehistoric-ostrich-shells-andhra-9426318\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">What discovery of prehistoric ostrich shells in Andhra means<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Megafauna term is generally used to describe animals weighing more than 50 kg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":24737,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-24736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}