Ice age aquatic animal

Here is a question from my 9 year old son.

In the ice age there were a lot of different land animals like saber tooth cats and mammoths. But what about animals that live in the water? Were there really different ones or just the same ones that we have now.

We tried to look this up on Google but havne’t found anything that addresses it.

Sure there were. I’ll try dig up more links later.

One example of an aquatic mammal that was widepread in the Pleistocene and now extinct is Steller’s Sea Cow. They once occurred all around the coasts of the Pacific Ocean, but were probably wiped out by early hunting cultures before the arrival of Europeans. A small remnant survived in the remote and uninhabited Commander Islands until they were discovered in 1741, being hunted to extinction by 1768.

Those are not from the “ice age,” but the Pliocene and (apparently) Miocene respectively, that is, millions of years older. Of course there were many aquatic mammals that existed earlier in the Tertiary.

Usually “the Ice Age” is taken to mean the most recent period of repeated glaciations during the Pleistocene epoch, from 1.8 million to about 10,000 years ago.

Most of our large marine mammals ARE pleistocene relicts. There was no massive die-off or hunting to extinction (not then, anyway), so most of them were still around until recently, or still are.

True. The extinction of most of the terrestrial megafauna, such as mammoths, giant ground sloths, sabretooths, etc. within the past few tens of thousands of years is thought by most scientists to be linked to the spread of modern humans around the planet during that time period. Humans haven’t been able to affect marine fauna in a really major way until much more recently, so the marine megafauna has mostly survived.

This came up because of the recent news that part of the reason many megafauna died off about 12,000 years ago may have been because of a meteor exploding in the atmosphere.

He was wondering if this affected the ocean animals as well.