Until a few thousand years ago, creatures that could have been from a sci-fi thrillerincluding gorilla-sized lemurs, 500-pound birds, and crocodiles that weighed a ton or moreroamed the earth. These great beasts, or megafauna, lived on every habitable continent and on many islands. With a handful of exceptions, all are now gone.What caused the disappearance of these prehistoric behemoths? No one event can be pinpointed as a specific cause, but several factors may have played a role. Paleomammalogist Ross D. E. MacPhee explores them all, examining the leading extinction theories, weighing the evidence, and presenting his own conclusions. He shows how theories of human overhunting and catastrophic climate change fail to account for critical features of these extinctions, and how new thinking is needed to elucidate these mysterious losses.Along the way, we learn how time is determined in earth history; how DNA is used to explain the genomics and phylogenetic history of megafaunaand how sy...
| Title | : | End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 9780393249293 |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 pages |
| Status | : | Available For Download |
| Last checked | : | 21 Minutes ago! |
End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals Reviews
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ARC provided by Edelweiss.
There are a lot of books about dinosaurs and their extinction, but not as many on the Ice Age extinction of animals like the smilodon or mastodon. With a background in anthropology, this was an update on some of the material I learned in college, which was really interesting. Also, we didn't cover worldwide extinctions, but focused mostly on North America. A lot of the information presented in this book was new to me and help me to better understand how this phenomenon ...more