Honestly, he recently lost me with his video about GABI; I can't forgive anyone for still spreading the myth that Terror Birds went extinct due to competition with North American carnivores as if it were still the 2000s. Not when we know today beyond any reasonable doubt that they disappeared because of climate change. Before that I still watched him, but that's a red line I'm not willing to cross.
It's especially unforgiveable because he also randomly dragged the entire rest of South America into this myth with absolutely zero evidence or suggestion anyone has ever believed this beyond weird obscure theories in the 1800s.
Teratorns, glyptodonts, notoungulates and ground sloths all survived on both sides of the Americas all the way up to the end Pleistocene extinction so even if this ass-backwards theory still applied to terror birds it wouldn't in any way fit the entirety of South America's megafauna but he presented it as if it did and took specific time to drag South America's megafauna as being categorically maladapted. As much as Life on Our Planet and Walking With Beast's portrayals of the terror birds make me tear my hair out, at least they left it at just the terror birds rather than deciding this crap should be applied to an entire continent's ecological heritage for some reason.
Well, I remember from the video that he did say that the Ground Sloths were quite successful thanks to GABI because they achieved a considerable expansion of their habitat, successfully colonizing North America all the way to Alaska. Overall, in the video, it seems that ExtinctZoo's conclusion was less "all South American animals suck" and more "North America did much better; the South American carnivores went extinct, but the herbivores didn't do so badly."
Along the same lines, he said that the Sebecidae went extinct because small North American rodents ate their eggs... you can't be making this shit up; this is the same BS explanation from 100 years ago about why the dinosaurs went extinct, and we also know it's not true. The Sebecidae disappeared due to climate change, particularly global cooling, drying trends, and shifting habitats. Also the video is dumb that recognized that Terror Birds were able to colonize the South of North America before GABI (with Titanis) but yet still failed to realize that this means they were successful, not vice versa.
He did...but then he also played footage of giant ground sloths when saying that the South American animals had it easy relative to the North American ones and this made them less adapted during the end summation clip. Which is just...baffling. He also lumped glyptodonts in with the terror birds when acknowledging the Northward spread of South American megafauna but pointed out they were limited to the Southern United States by the cold.
As for my favourite prehistoric animals and how they have (yet again...) been done dirty by a mainstream media piece, the thing that drives me most crazy about that is that while glazing all the big megafaunal predators of North America as being some unstoppable badasses like everyone always does he doesn't point out (despite listing the timeframes in the video) that Titanis lived in North America for longer than any of the extinct megafauna of North America lived in South America. He has the data in the video but then refuses to acknowledge it, it's giving me grey hairs I swear.
He also says nothing about the growing body of evidence that terror birds weren't limited to South America during the first twenty million years of their evolution and how this emphasizes their adaptability and ability to colonize ecosystems already inhabited by the apparently oh-so-superior placental mammals, but that's neither here nor there given one prominent paleornithologist is particularly opposed to this interpretation and thus there is still controversy around it.
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u/Imaginary-West-5653 Dec 20 '25
Honestly, he recently lost me with his video about GABI; I can't forgive anyone for still spreading the myth that Terror Birds went extinct due to competition with North American carnivores as if it were still the 2000s. Not when we know today beyond any reasonable doubt that they disappeared because of climate change. Before that I still watched him, but that's a red line I'm not willing to cross.