End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals
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- €17.99
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- €17.99
Publisher Description
The fascinating lives and puzzling demise of some of the largest animals on earth.
Until a few thousand years ago, creatures that could have been from a sci-fi thriller—including gorilla-sized lemurs, 500-pound birds, and crocodiles that weighed a ton or more—roamed 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 megafauna—and how synthetic biology and genetic engineering may be able to reintroduce these giants of the past. Until then, gorgeous four-color illustrations by Peter Schouten re-create these megabeasts here in vivid detail.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MacPhee (Race to the End), a paleomammalogist with the American Museum of Natural History, critically examines theories on the extinction of many huge vertebrate species over the past 50,000 years in this lavishly illustrated volume. These "near time extinctions," as MacPhee terms them, wiped out sabertooth cats, gorilla-sized lemurs, half-ton lizards, and other oversized species. At the outset, MacPhee declares, "all serious positions... deserve a hearing," and he proceeds to demonstrate this point. Rigorously examining the evidence for and against various hypotheses, he shows that the two major contenders point to either "overkill" excessive hunting by early humans or climate change as the causes. MacPhee lays the groundwork for his discussion with chapters on the state of the world during this period, the spread of humans and their precursors, and earlier theories regarding "near time" extinctions. To enliven the text, the book includes cartoons, maps, graphs, sidebars on such topics as "Mammoth on the Menu," and most importantly, Peter Schouten's marvelous color illustrations of gomphotheres, diprotodonts, mammoths, and the rest. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the subject of animal extinctions, in the present or the past.
