Eulogy for the Megafauna

While science blogs may not be as popular as the dedicated how-to-create-your-own-dog-pajamas or make-a-fabulous-soap-dispenser-in-12-easy-steps type blogs, I am bypassing that domestic delirium, for now, to discuss the sudden decline in large-bodied vertebrates at the end of the last Ice Age. Whoopee! you are surely thinking.  

But actually it's a topic that is both more connected to our history and embedded in our future than it might first seem. These ancient giants permeate our culture and many are familiar today through films like Ice Age, a personal favourite. Saber-tooth cats, dire wolves (yes, they exist(ed) outside the realms of Game of Thrones), camels and giant ground sloths roamed North America. Eurasia boasted woolly rhinoceros and mammoth, cave lions and wild horses, while giant kangaroos and wombats coexisted with marsupial lions in what is now Australia. Then, between fifty and ten thousand years ago, around 90 genera of large-bodied mammals disappeared (Koch & Barnosky, 2006).

So why did they disappear? Their icy world was drying out; did they fail to adapt to a warming planet?

Doomed? The Meltdown.
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Paleontologists long thought that these beasts disappeared due to a shift to a warmer interglacial period in the late Pleistocene, their habitats shrinking as the ice retreated (Levy 2011). However, evidence implicating Homo sapiens as the driver of these extinctions has been mounting in recent years. Many species had survived previous interglacials (Levy 2011), so what was different? Was it humans, climate, or both?

This blog will explore the evidence for both human and climate mediated extinctions of the Pleistocene megafauna, investigating the species themselves as well as their environments and the roles they played within them. Parallels will also be drawn with modern times: are the extant ancestors of the Pleistocene megafauna currently experiencing a second wave of extinctions?