Ice Age rodent control

Years ago, when I was newly a teenager, my parents crammed the kids in the car and drove to the Shubenacadie Wildlife Park. The fenced woodland near the entrance held more velvety-antlered caribou than you could count. Now there are none. The caribou succumbed decades ago to disease.

We did not see any skunks - disease had wiped them out, or beaver, though there was a beaver dam which was inhabited. Years later, a low enclosure at the park held many skunks (descented, of course, but still fragrant): fluffy, waddling about like little black and white dust mops, but their fur was as coarse as a scouring pad.

Close by, a new enclosure held a pair of beaver. What a size! (Had we known how huge the critter was, Jean Harrington and I would never have dared use the beaver dam close to her father’s mill for a trampoline!) A beaver hunched near the fence, chomping away on a stick with teeth the size of spatulas. Alarming, but the nearness of that rich brown coat was tempting, plush and sleekly conditioned. “There’s nothing new under the sun,” I’ve heard. Well, there always seems to be something new on my horizon; although, strictly speaking, this something is very old and, perhaps, is only news to me. Have you already heard about Mega Beaver? I thought someone was pulling my leg; maybe not!

They ranged over North America at the end of the Pleistocene Era. It is supposed the most recent Ice Age caused their demise, more than 10,000 years ago, although some references claim the coming of man may also have had something to do with it. Fossils have been found from Florida to Toronto* and it seems some complete skeletons have been found.** Only fragments have been found in our neighbourhood—Atlantic Geology reports a tooth fragment found on Indian Island at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy.

Before the melt of that last Ice Age, much of the Minas Basin was dry land. Who knows what lies buried in the mud out there? Mega Beaver was something over eight feet long and weighed up to - and over - 400 pounds. The fossil teeth are six inches long and curved - not suited to chomping down trees. Artists’ interpretations show a creature very like the one stamped on every Canadian nickel, but there is nothing to tell us whether the hind feet were webbed or how the tail was shaped. There’s nothing to tell us either whether Mega Beaver had a coat, silky and dense, like its little cousins’, or one more like a bear’s, bristly and abrasive.

Wouldn’t it be something if, when we find Glooscap’s stone canoe, we find traces of the largest rodent of them all! *http://mapserver.museum.state.il.us/faunmapweb/faunmap.phtml?Taxon=CIoh&Age=ALL ** http://www.fossil-treasures-of-florida.com/giant-beaver.html