By Paul S. Martin
As lately as 11,000 years ago--"near time" to geologists--mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, floor sloths, immense armadillos, local camels and horses, the dire wolf, and plenty of different huge mammals roamed North the USA. In what has develop into one in all science's maximum riddles, those huge animals vanished in North and South the USA round the time people arrived on the finish of the final nice ice age. half paleontological event and half memoir, Twilight of the Mammoths presents intimately the world over popular paleoecologist Paul Martin's largely mentioned and debated "overkill" speculation to provide an explanation for those mysterious megafauna extinctions. Taking us from Rampart collapse the Grand Canyon, the place he reveals himself "chest deep in sloth dung," to different very important fossil websites in Arizona and Chile, Martin's enticing ebook, written for a large viewers, uncovers our wealthy evolutionary legacy and exhibits why he has come to think that the earliest americans actually hunted those animals to demise.
As he discusses the discoveries that introduced him to this speculation, Martin relates many colourful tales and offers a wealthy evaluate of the sector of paleontology in addition to his personal interesting occupation. He explores the ramifications of the overkill speculation for comparable extinctions around the globe and examines different motives for the extinctions, together with weather switch. Martin's visionary wondering our lacking megafauna bargains suggestion and a problem for today's conservation efforts as he speculates on what we would do to therapy this situation--both in our brooding about what's "natural" and within the wildlife itself.
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Extra info for Twilight of the Mammoths:: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America (Organisms and Environments)
Example text
Palaeopropithecus; 2. Megaladapis; 3. Babakotia; 4. Archaeolemur; 5. Hadropithecus; 6. Archaeoindris. Reprinted from Simons 1997. than ostriches. Unlike ostriches and emus, the moas presumably moved with their heads down for easier travel through dense forests. Hawaii saw the near-time extinctions of many birds, including a flightless gooselike duck, Thambetochen, and a flightless ibis, Apteribis, both named by Storrs Olson and Alexander Wetmore of the Smithsonian Institution. Other islands in the remote Pacific lost endemic parrots, pigeons, doves, megapodes or bush turkeys (Megapodius), and especially flightless rails (Gallirallus), as well as large invertebrates such as land snails.
Of the two genera of North American sirenians known north of Mexico, Trichechus, the manatee (600 kilograms, or roughly 1,300 pounds), survives in the coastal waters of Florida. In the Quaternary, Hydrodamalis stelleri, Steller’s sea cow (over an order of magnitude heavier than a manatee), disappeared from the coastal waters of California and Alaska, and a related species disappeared from Japan. A population that probably did not exceed 1,000 to 2,000 animals survived in the kelp beds of the undiscovered and uninhabited Commander Islands of the northwestern Pacific.
Are thought to have become extinct by the end of the Pleistocene; Antillean taxa held on until the middle-late Holocene (at least on some islands), but all were gone well before European arrival” (White and MacPhee 2001). Eight taxa occurred in Cuba, six on the island of Hispaniola, two genera in Puerto Rico and one each in Grenada and Curaçao. A few specimens have been radiocarbon dated; the early returns indicate that the dwarf species lasted thousands of years longer than their massive continental relatives, their extinction coincidental with human colonization of the West Indies.