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The 'American Cheetah' Was Actually a Different Animal All Along
The Ice Age movies get one major thing right: Climate shifts and glaciation caused profound animal migrations and evolutionary adaptations – though it's uncertain if any of them resulted from an acorn-burying saber-toothed squirrel splitting a continent. During the Pleistocene epoch, circa 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, or what's colloquially called the most recent 'ice age', North America hosted an awe-inspiring assortment of impressive animals. Giant bears that stood up to 12 feet tall pooped in caves, woolly mammoths trumpeted across the frigid tundra steppes, and 'American cheetahs' chased 'American antelope' across expanding grasslands. An artistic conception of an 'American cheetah', which weighed around 70 kilograms (150 pounds) and was around 2.4 meters (8 feet) from tip to tail, chasing down a Saiga antelope, a survivor of the ice age.
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