Imagine wandering the vast landscapes of North America during the last Ice Age in the Pleistocene

epic. The diversity and enormousness of the mammalian wildlife would blow your mind. There are giant

sloths, mastodons, camels, American lions, horses, giant beavers, and so many more. These abundant ice age beasts

add up to a lot of tasty meat walking around. Carnivores are killing to get at that meat,

and prey animals are being killed for theirs. The body count is high. There are half-eaten carcasses all over the place, and every animal,

whether a predator or prey, is going to keel over and die at some point, of old age if they're

lucky. So large, rotting mammal carcasses are an abundant resource during the ice ages. And where

there's an abundant resource, no matter how

disgusting it is, there's usually a group of animals that evolves to take advantage of it.

This is where vultures come in. Vultures are the cleanup crew. No other vertebrate animals are so

perfectly adapted to a life of scavenging for dead meat.

These birds were around in North and South America for millions of years before the Ice Ages.

But it was in that chilly time that vultures and condors really hit their stride.

The plethora of furry corpses sprinkled across the Ice Age tundra and grasslands supported many species

of scavenging birds. It was the golden age of the New World vulture. Without these birds,

all those dead mammal bodies would have taken much longer to decompose. Nutrients would take

longer to return to the soil. Meanwhile, things would get pretty

stinky and foul. Diseases would end up spreading more easily among the living megafauna.

Now, thousands of years later, vultures and condors in North and South America still act as our

cleanup crew. They do their part to keep the world relatively clean and free of disease.

These birds are integral members of almost every terrestrial ecosystem in the Western

Hemisphere.

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