One place we see it in action is in the weird, giant mammals that lived during the  Pleistocene epoch in South America.

我们看到它起作用的一个地方是生活在南美洲更新世时期的奇怪的巨型哺乳动物。

In the early 1980s, paleontologists studying the fossils of giant kangaroos and rhino-sized wombat-relatives from the Pleistocene epoch of Australia found something odd.

20 世纪 80 年代初，古生物学家在研究澳大利亚更新世时期的巨型袋鼠和犀牛大小的袋熊近亲化石时发现了一些奇怪的东西。

What if the drawings made by the original inhabitants of Arnhem Land were a faithful record of the wildlife they'd actually seen - wildlife that went extinct during the Pleistocene epoch?

如果阿纳姆地原住民绘制的图画是他们实际看到的野生动物的忠实记录——在更新世时期灭绝的野生动物，那会怎么样？

In fact, we know that this happened at least a few times over the course of the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from around 2.6 million years ago until around 12,000 years ago.

事实上， 我们知道这种情况在更新世时期至少发生过几次，更新世时期从大约 260 万年前持续到大约 12,000 年前。

But the most recent, and by far the largest of them, was Gigantopithecus blacki It lived from 2 million to 100 thousand years ago during the Pleistocene epoch, in what's now south China and Vietnam.

但最近的， 也是迄今为止最大的，是 Gigantopithecus blacki 它生活在 200 万到 10 万年前的更新世时期，位于现在的中国南部和越南。

The genus Thylacoleo alone was able to survive through the Pliocene into the Pleistocene epoch, where it eventually gave rise to Thylacoleo carnifex – the last and largest member of its family, which survived until around forty thousand years ago.

仅袋狼属就能够从上新世生存到更新世，最终产生了袋狼科——袋狼科中最后也是最大的成员，一直存活到大约四万年前。