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End of the Megafauna - Ross D E MacPhee
Dec. 28th, 2023 10:02 pmTechnically the title is End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals, but that was a lot for the subject line.
This book was one of the little indulgences I got myself for Christmas, and it's been really excellent for reading bits and pieces without having to track a plot. It has many lovely color plates of different extinct Pleistocene ecosystems from all over the world, including various islands, different parts of Africa, and several Australian biomes, in addition to the usual North American steppe and so forth that you typically see in illustrations of the Pleistocene world.
As well as a broad tour of various extinct species, the well known and not so well known, the book is a general top-level overview of theories for why the end-of-Ice-Age extinctions happened, and the evidence for and against each. I appreciate that the author works hard to present each one in historical context and give it a fair appraisal. Obviously the two main competing ones are climate change and human action, but there's also a brief discussion of others such as disease and a very fringe asteroid impact theory.
There are also a number of interesting tidbits, facts, and other details, like the sprinting owls mentioned earlier. Or a theory (obviously unproven and unprovable) mentioned in passing that I found particularly intriguing - that the (in)famous tameness of many island species, causing them to fail to flee from newly arrived humans or invasive species that are able to kill them in large numbers, might not be naivety about new predators but rather, that their passivity is an evolved, adaptive trait in response to living in a restricted environment - basically that the same suite of genetically linked changes that causes tameness and physical size changes in domestic animals is also at work on island animals.
This book was one of the little indulgences I got myself for Christmas, and it's been really excellent for reading bits and pieces without having to track a plot. It has many lovely color plates of different extinct Pleistocene ecosystems from all over the world, including various islands, different parts of Africa, and several Australian biomes, in addition to the usual North American steppe and so forth that you typically see in illustrations of the Pleistocene world.
As well as a broad tour of various extinct species, the well known and not so well known, the book is a general top-level overview of theories for why the end-of-Ice-Age extinctions happened, and the evidence for and against each. I appreciate that the author works hard to present each one in historical context and give it a fair appraisal. Obviously the two main competing ones are climate change and human action, but there's also a brief discussion of others such as disease and a very fringe asteroid impact theory.
There are also a number of interesting tidbits, facts, and other details, like the sprinting owls mentioned earlier. Or a theory (obviously unproven and unprovable) mentioned in passing that I found particularly intriguing - that the (in)famous tameness of many island species, causing them to fail to flee from newly arrived humans or invasive species that are able to kill them in large numbers, might not be naivety about new predators but rather, that their passivity is an evolved, adaptive trait in response to living in a restricted environment - basically that the same suite of genetically linked changes that causes tameness and physical size changes in domestic animals is also at work on island animals.