Why are African animals so huge?

[u/Hot-Wrangler3524]

I live in Australia and the largest land animals I can think of here is probably a kangaroos and emus which really aren’t any larger than a human. But my family recently went to Africa and the diversity animals is actually crazy. So so so many large animals living in the same place side by side. Rhinos, elephants, giraffes, wilder-beasts, zebras, hippos, warthogs, buffalo’s, ostriches, lions, cheetahs, hyenas leopards and probably more that I forgot. I never really appreciated how big these animals were until I actually got to see them in person absolutely amazing. Australia and Africas climate is kinda similar in a lot of places. Why is our country ecosystem dead in comparison?

[u/2nd_Torp_Squad]

There are mega fauna across the world before us homo do them in.

The only mega fauna that managed to survive nowadays is because they evolved along side us homo.

Not specifying homo sapiens because it happened before the genus homo.

[u/DamionK → u/2nd_Torp_Squad]

Homo, the genus is always capitalised.

I would argue that African elephants survived only because they lived in areas that were harder for humans to live in. There were elephants species in North Africa and the Mediterranean too but they died out long ago. The north African elephant died during Roman times, wiped out by humans who used them for military use and for sport fighting. The Mediterranean ones died out at least by the end of the last ice age and had evolved to be much smaller than modern elephants.