Contemporaneity of late Cretaceous extinctions

Terminal cretaceous extinctions and the arctic spillover model.

Late Quaternary Extinctions: State of the Debate

Between fifty and ten thousand years ago, most large mammals became extinct everywhere except Africa. Slow-breeding animals also were hard hit, regardless of size. This unusual extinction of large and slow-breeding animals provides some of the strongest support for a human contribution to their extinction and is consistent with various human hunting models, but it is difficult to explain by mod...

A Possible Late Cretaceous “haramiyidan” from India

S. ANANTHARAMAN, G. P. WILSON, D. C. DAS SARMA, W. A. CLEMENS, Palaeontology Division, Geological Survey of India, Hyderabad, 500-068 India, [email protected]; Corresponding author, Department of Earth Sciences, Denver Museum of Nature & Science, 2001 Colorado Boulevard., Denver, Colorado 80205-5798 U.S.A., [email protected]; Museum of Paleontology and Department of Integrative Biology, ...

Assessing the causes of late Pleistocene extinctions on the continents.

One of the great debates about extinction is whether humans or climatic change caused the demise of the Pleistocene megafauna. Evidence from paleontology, climatology, archaeology, and ecology now supports the idea that humans contributed to extinction on some continents, but human hunting was not solely responsible for the pattern of extinction everywhere. Instead, evidence suggests that the i...

Ecological consequences of Late Quaternary extinctions of megafauna.

Large herbivorous vertebrates have strong interactions with vegetation, affecting the structure, composition and dynamics of plant communities in many ways. Living large herbivores are a small remnant of the assemblages of giants that existed in most terrestrial ecosystems 50,000 years ago. The extinction of so many large herbivores may well have triggered large changes in plant communities. In...