By Peter D. Ward
Just 12,000 years in the past - on the peak of the final Ice Age - saber-toothed tigers, huge floor sloths, camels, hippos and the good herds of proboscideans: immense mastodons and mammoths, extinct family of the elephant, roamed the land the place skyscrapers now stand. Why are those superb creatures now not with us? This compelling booklet explores the explanations for those extinctions and gives a travel of mass extinctions all through earth's heritage, together with the good comet crash that killed off the dinosaurs. Brilliantly written, The name of far away Mammoths is a fascinating exploration of the historical past of lifestyles and the significance of humanity as an evolutionary force.
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Extra info for The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared
Sample text
But I know that my continent-crossing journey must be nearing its end, for the trees begin to reappear. Giant marsupial game becomes common again, and finally, far in the distance, I see the low blue expanse of the ocean. I am alert now, and the balloon is rushing forward. As I approach a beach a new vision appears: In the ocean is a poor sort of raft, logs lashed together but clearly battered, and on that raft sit dark-skinned men and women, weakly paddling. The raft makes shore, and the humans tumble off.
New York City was considering water rationing, and the weather, or rather the strangeness of it, overshadowed even Newt Gingrich, Colin Powell, and the imminent financial default of the nation as a topic of streetcomer conversation. It turned out that the Washington meeting I attended was also concerned with the weather, but in this case the Paleozoic weather of 250 million years ago. It was an odd sort of meeting as scientific concourses go, being small, with attendance by invitation only. There were several Europeans, a Chinese, and a Russian scientist.
The periods known as the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Mississippian, Pennsylvanian and Permian constitute the Paleozoic Era, the "time of ancient life," which dates from 530 to 250 million years ago. The Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous make up the Mesozoic Era, the "time of middle life," which extended from 250 to 65 million years ago. The Tertiary, Quaternary, and Recent are the periods of the Cenozoic Era, the "time of new life," which extends from the end of the Mesozoic to the present day.