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
While doing research for an upcoming blog post, I was reading a paper about how megafauna may have reduced woody cover in South America during the Pleistocene, and how today’s dry forest there could more closely resemble savannah if they were still around1. That gave me an interesting thought-there’s a lot of dry seasonal forest
There are few places on the planet as distinctive as Australia. With its isolated geographical location and iconic landscapes, it captures the imagination of people the world over. Picturesque red deserts, glistening beaches, and Eucalyptus woodlands may provide its most characteristic scenery, but arcane rainforests, snow-covered mountains, and much more can be found on the
The world was a very different place during the height of last ice age-known as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM)-with very different climates, landscapes, and floral and faunal distributions compared to our current epoch, the Holocene. The exact chronology of this period varies according to the source but it is generally considered to be the
Genetic analysis can provide incredible and often counterintuitive discoveries about the relationships between and within species and their unique ancestral histories. A study was published 3 years ago which explored the genomes of three Pleistocene black bear genomes found in eDNA in central Mexico and compared them to genomes of black bears in the eastern,
The very last population of woolly mammoths in the world survived on a small tundra island in northeast Siberia until only about 4,000 years ago, when the Egyptian pyramids were being built. They outlasted their cousins on the mainland by thousands of years, and have been the subject of intense research and intrigue. This remote
If you’re well-versed in Pleistocene ecology, you’ve almost certainly heard about the steppe-tundra, also known as the mammoth steppe. During the Last Glacial Period, this biome covered vast parts of three continents: Europe, Asia, and North America. The name “steppe-tundra” refers to the fact that it contained a unique mixture of steppe and tundra species,
One of the most striking things about the glacial cycles of the last 2.5 million years is how species survived the various dramatic shifts in climate. Among the ways plants and animals survived unfavorable climatic phases was retreating to relatively small regions where conditions remained tolerable, and then using those areas as bases from which