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Part III - The Big Mammal Menagerie: Herbivores, Carnivores and Their Ecosystem Impacts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2021

Norman Owen-Smith
Norman Owen-Smith
Affiliation:
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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Summary

Africa’s large herbivore assemblage is the product of the environments that also nurtured human origins and these animals contributed to evolutionary transitions in our hominin lineage. Around 90 species of large herbivore can be tallied on the continent, around half of them associated with the savanna biome (Figure III.1; the rest live in forests or deserts). All of them are ungulates, representing the orders Artiodactyla (with even-toes) and Perissodactyla (with odd-toes), except for the African elephant (Proboscidea). They span a range in body mass from ~5000-kg elephants down to 5-kg dikdiks.

Type
Chapter
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Only in Africa
The Ecology of Human Evolution
 , pp. 141 - 246
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

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Suggested Further Reading

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Suggested Further Reading

Owen-Smith, N. (1988) Megaherbivores. The Influence of Very Large Body Size on Ecology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar

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Suggested Further Reading

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