Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 1.48"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 1.48"
Today's beavers are cute, but if you were staring down a Pleistocene Epoch's Giant Beaver, you might keep your distance. Growing to the size of a bear and with six-inch incisors in their jaw, these mammals flourished during the last Ice Age.
This specimen is a piece of a Giant Beaver's incisor, recovered on private land in Florida. The tooth measures 1.48" in length.
📸 GIANT BEAVER INCISORS
RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE
During the Pleistocene Epoch, there were many ancestors of modern mammals of incredible, gigantic sizes. These megafauna evolved to such size because they had few predators and plenty of vegetation to go around, allowing them to evolve larger forms.
Among these creatures, the Giant Beaver puts its descendants to shame, growing to the size of a bear at around six to seven feet in length. In its jaw were massive incisors measuring around six inches, letting them chew through the abundant vegetation of the time.
📸 YOU SURE WOULDN'T WANT TO BE BITTEN BY ONE OF THESE!
This specimen from Mini Museum is a piece of a Giant Beaver incisor recovered on private land in Florida. While we might imagine Castoroides using these mighty teeth to fell enormous trees, their blunt ends suggest the Giant Beaver lived as muskrats do today, feasting on softer, leafy plants rather than building dams and lodges.
Each specimen is a unique fossil and no two are exactly alike. You can see all the currently available Giant Beaver teeth in the collection below!
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 1.25"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 1.30"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 1.33"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 1.48"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 1.57"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 1.58"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 1.74"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 2.06"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 2.81"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 2.85"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 2.89"
Giant Beaver Tooth SOLD 3.24"
MORE ABOUT GIANT BEAVERS
📸 CASTOROIDES SKULL DIAGRAM. LOOK AT THOSE CHOMPERS!
SOME VERY BUSY BEAVERS
Modern American and Eurasian beavers are both impressively hefty rodents, outsized only by the South American capybara. Yet the 70 or so pounds (~32 kg) these industrious aquatic mammals attain make them relatively tiny compared to a Pleistocene Epoch counterpart: Castoroides. Popularly known as the Giant Beaver, Castoroides was about the size of a modern black bear, weighing roughly 220 pounds (100 kg) and measuring more than 7 feet (2.5 m) without their long, flat tails.
📸 PALEO ART BY CHARLES R. KNIGHT
Two species of Castoroides inhabited North America: C. leiseyorum, found only in Florida, and the much more widespread C. ohioensis, whose fossils have been recovered from a broad range of places in Alaska, Canada, and the continental United States, though they’re most abundant along the southern edge of the Great Lakes in present-day Illinois and Indiana.
Castoroides appears to have favored marshes and swamp-edged lakes. One 2001 study reconstructed the paleo-environment of a female C. ohioensis that died some 10,000 years ago in northeastern Indiana; this giant beaver apparently inhabited a bulrush marsh/wet meadow ringed by boreal-style conifer forest.
📸 CASTOROIDES OHIOENSIS
Important morphological differences exist between Castoroides and its modern cousin, Castor. The Giant Beaver’s incisors, which reached six inches (15cm) in length, were blunt-tipped as opposed to Castor’s chisel teeth. This suggests Castoroides didn’t gnaw through trees and construct dams as the modern American beaver does. The giant beaver’s proportionately smaller, smoother brain also hints that it may not have exhibited complex social behavior.
Further Reading
Cope, E. D. “The Extinct Rodentia of North America (Continued).” The American Naturalist 17.4 (1883): 370-381.
Harington, C. Richard. “Giant beaver, Castoroides ohioensis, remains in Canada and an overlooked report from Ontario.” The Canadian Field-Naturalist 121.3 (2007): 330-333.
Haynes, Gary. “Estimates of Clovis-era megafaunal populations and their extinction risks.” American megafaunal extinctions at the end of the pleistocene. Springer, Dordrecht, 2009. 39 53.
Hulbert, R. C., Andreas Kerner, and Gary S. Morgan. “Taxonomy of the Pleistocene giant beaver Castoroides (Rodentia: Castoridae) from the southeastern United States.” Bull. Florida Mus. Nat. Hist. 53 (2014): 26-43.
Müller-Schwarze, Dietland. The Beaver: Its Life & Impact. Comstock Publishing Associates, 2011.
Poliquin, Rachel. Beaver. Reaktion Books Ltd, 2015.
Swinehart, Anthony L. and Ronald L. Richards. “Paleoecology of a Northast Indiana Wetland Harboring Remains of the Pleistocene Giant Beaver (Castoroides ohioensis).” Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Sciences, vol. 110, 2001, pp. 151-166.
Williamson, C. W. History of Western Ohio and Auglaize County. Theclassics Us, 2013. (p. 339 lodge found in new knoxville, oh)
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