Ice Age Animals Coloring Pages
Ice Age animals lived through some of the coldest years our planet has had in the last few million years. Many of them grew thick fur and huge bodies to stay warm, and many of the biggest ones had died out by the time the last glaciers melted.
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Animals of the Ice Age
Bison priscus
The steppe bison, Bison priscus, was an ancestor of today's American and European bison. Ice Age artists painted it on cave walls, and some of those paintings in Spain are more than 14,000 years old.
Castoroides
Castoroides was a giant beaver about the size of a black bear. Its front teeth were up to 15 centimetres long.
Cave Bear
Cave bears were as big as a large grizzly, but they mostly ate plants. Thousands of their bones have been found in caves across Europe, where they slept through the winter.
Dire Wolf
Dire wolves looked like big gray wolves, but DNA from their fossils shows they weren't close relatives at all. They were a separate branch of the dog family that lived in North and South America until about 13,000 years ago...
Elasmotherium
Elasmotherium was nicknamed the Siberian unicorn for the single big horn on its forehead. It weighed about as much as an elephant, but horns rarely fossilise, so nobody knows for sure how long that one was.
Giant Ground Sloth
Megatherium was a giant ground sloth about as big as an elephant. It could stand up on its back legs to pull branches down to its mouth, and its relatives are the small tree sloths of today.
Glyptodon
Glyptodons looked like they belonged with the dinosaurs, but they were mammals and close relatives of the modernn day armadillo. Some were as big as a small car, with a shell made of hundreds of bony plates that fit together like tiles.
Homotherium
Homotherium was called the scimitar-toothed cat because its upper teeth were shorter and flatter than a Smilodon's, a bit like curved knife blades. It also had long legs and a sloping back, which made it better at chasing prey across open ground...
Mastodon
A mastodon's back teeth had pointed bumps for crushing twigs and leaves, while a mammoth's had flat ridges for grinding grass. That's one way scientists can tell their teeth apart.
Megalodon
Megalodon died out about 3.5 million years ago, before the Ice Age began. Its biggest teeth were about as long as a grown-up's hand, and fossil hunters still find them on beaches today...
Megaloceros
Megaloceros had the biggest antlers of any deer that ever lived, stretching more than three metres from tip to tip. It's often called the Irish elk because so many skeletons have turned up in Irish bogs.
Meganeura
Meganeura was a giant relative of dragonflies with wings about as wide as a pigeon's. It lived about 300 million years ago, which is long before the dinosaurs and even longer before the Ice Age.
Pleistocene Horse
Horses first evolved in North America, but the wild ones there died out near the end of the Ice Age. They didn't come back until Spanish explorers brought horses across the ocean in the 1500s.
Procoptodon
Procoptodon was a kangaroo more than two metres tall that lived in Australia. It had a single big toe on each foot and two long clawed fingers on each hand for pulling branches down to eat the leaves.
Smilodon
The sabre teeth of a Smilodon could grow about 28 centimetres long, but they were thin enough to snap. Scientists think the cat held its prey still with its strong front legs first.
Wooly Mammoth
A baby woolly mammoth found frozen in Siberia in 2007 was so well preserved that scientists found her mother's milk still in her stomach...
Woolly Rhinoceros
The front horn of a woolly rhinoceros was flat like a blade and could be about a metre long. Ice Age artists painted these rhinos on cave walls in France.
Early Humans
Caveman
Not every Ice Age person lived in a cave. In what is now Ukraine, some families built round huts out of mammoth bones and covered them with animal hides.
Ötzi the Iceman
Ötzi lived about 5,300 years ago, long after the last Ice Age ended, but a glacier kept him frozen until hikers found him in the Ötztal Alps in 1991. He was wearing a fur cap, a grass cloak and leather leggings, with grass stuffed inside his shoes to keep his feet warm. Scientists have even studied what he ate for his last meal.
About the Ice Age
"The Ice Age" was really many cold periods. Over the last 2.6 million years, huge ice sheets grew and melted back again and again, and the most recent cold period ended about 11,700 years ago.
At its coldest, around 20,000 years ago, ice more than two kilometres thick covered much of Canada and northern Europe. So much water was locked up in that ice that the sea was about 120 metres lower than it is today, and animals and people could walk from Siberia to Alaska across land that is now under water.
Scientists call this long stretch of time the Pleistocene. When the climate warmed and the glaciers melted, many of the biggest animals disappeared. Bison, musk oxen, reindeer and wolves made it through, and their descendants are still around today.