Misplaced in Time

North America had, during the last interglacial period between periods of what we call Ice Ages, various forms of mega fauna that we usually associate with Africa today. Besides the so-called giant horses, bone-crushing dogs, and giant forms of sloth, there were hairy rhinos and elephants, the latter usually went by names like mastodon and mammoth. Camelids even seem to have likely originated in North America before moving all over the world, but this was before the cooling periods of the Ice Ages.

There were even a specialized type of giraffe that developed in North America, and it was naturally selected for speed instead of stretching for leaves high in a tree.

AND it never went extinct.

Today is remains, a speedster without a hunter, the second fastest land mammal on Earth, only breached in velocity by the highest speed achieved by a cheetah, and that predator remains an ocean and continent away.

This is the pronghorn. Sometimes called the "pronghorn antelope" and, for some reason in my memory it's known as the "pronghorn sheep," it is actually neither an antelope nor a sheep. It is an Ice Age remnant, occasionally described using the loathed-by-the-scientific-community term "living fossil," similar to California condors and the coelacanth.

And it's our very own giraffe-kin.

I didn't know this, that pronghorns were more giraffe than antelope, and that's pretty cool.