During glacial periods when the global sea level was lower, large areas of now-submerged land were exposed. In many cases, the exposure of these continental shelves allowed landmasses that are now disconnected by water to become joined with one another. One of the most famous cases of this was the paleocontinent “Sahul”, which connected the […]
The mammoth steppe. Anyone who has heard the term is guaranteed to be at least somewhat familiar with Pleistocene paleontology and paleoecology. It was the largest biome in the world during ice ages, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in Western Europe all the way through Siberia and into Alaska and the Yukon, which has made
At first glance, North America and Europe share many superficial geographical and natural similarities. This is probably to be expected of any two continents, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless. For example, both continents border the Atlantic Ocean and are located largely within the middle latitudes. The mid-Atlantic’s temperate forests somewhat resemble those of France and
Granada is a well-known town in southern Spain. Like many other cities in Spain and southern Europe in general, it’s a popular tourist resort. Millions of people visit each year to see sites such as the famous Alhambra-a palace and fortress which is a legacy of the Moors. Not far from Granada is Cordoba, another
Picture this: it’s the tail end of the last ice age. The gargantuan ice sheets that cover Europe and North America are rapidly receding. It’s quickly become warmer than at any point in the previous hundred thousand years in the Northern Hemisphere, which has caused the ranges of plants and animals to change rapidly. Then,
A study published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) indicates that the fossils of Late Pleistocene big cats once believed to have been tigers were actually cave lions. The fossils were, for the first time, analyzed genetically as opposed to morphologically, which led to these intriguing conclusions. It’s well known that
There are few places in this world more captivating than the Amazon. While the Amazon biome includes the famous Amazon rainforest as well as adjacent ecoregions, the term “Amazon” usually refers principally to the rainforest itself. Located within the Amazon basin, it is home to the mighty Amazon River-the largest river by water discharge and either
Apple TV has just released Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age, the third season of the franchise (Link). This time the series jumps tens of millions of years forward-from the Mesozoic landscapes of the first two seasons to (as the name implies) the much more frigid and turbulent world of the Pleistocene. I write and read way
In the previous sections of this three-part series, we explored why humans, not climate, played the much larger part in the extinction of Late Quaternary megafauna. However, what should be a rather straightforward reality has been obscured by a swathe of scientific papers with questionable conclusions. In this final piece of my series, I will
In the first section of this three part series, we examined the background and defining characteristics of the Late Quaternary Extinctions and explored the nuances of climate change and ecology. In doing so, we showed that the support for climate as the central driver of the disappearance of so many species over the past few
