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, this rather obvious reality has been obscured by a swathe of scientific papers with questionable conclusions. In this final piece of my series, I will aim to foster
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
Like many other people, the natural world has fascinated me from a very young age. I spent countless hours in my childhood drawing, reading about, and watching documentaries on animals such as tigers, brown bears, lions, various species of deer, buffalo, and so much more. I learned about the diets, physical attributes, and geographic distributions
On this blog, we’ve explored key aspects of the Pleistocene across multiple regions—South America, North America, Australia, and part of Asia. Today, we turn to Europe, a continent that has received perhaps the most attention in paleontological and Paleolithic research. The disproportionate wealth of information we have about Europe’s history is not only because of
Pleistocene Ice Ages conjure up notions of intense cold, massive glaciers, and an endless wilderness hosting a large and diverse community of animals. Most people understand that it was a very different world. Yet, if a layman were to go tens of thousands of years back in time, the landscapes they would encounter would not
See the forests in the pictures above? They are located in the Sikhote-Alin mountains in the Russian Far East. While undoubtedly scenic, a person not familiar with biodiversity in this part of the world may not understand what is so special about them. After all, they more or less just resemble forests in much of
Welcome to part 2 of this series on Late Pleistocene American extinctions. In Part 1, we introduced the debate regarding the Late Pleistocene extinctions in the Americas and thoroughly explained why humans were not simply a factor, but the main factor in the demise of megafauna. In this section, we will explore the evidence for
Nowhere is more central to the subject of the Late Pleistocene extinctions than the Americas. It was based on the staggering losses of megafauna here that an American geoscientist, Paul Martin, proposed his theory that the first humans to enter the New World were responsible for the elimination of most large-bodied species through overhunting, also