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How Mammoths Lost The Extinction Lottery
Nature ^ | November 2, 2011 | Ewen Callaway

Posted on 11/04/2011 7:25:31 PM PDT by SunkenCiv

Woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos and other large animals driven to extinction since the last ice age each succumbed to a different lethal mix of circumstances...

Researchers who studied the fate of six species of 'megafauna' over the past 50,000 years found that climate change and habitat loss were involved in many of the extinctions, with humans playing a part in some cases but not others. But there was no clear pattern to explain why the animals died off, and it proved impossible to predict from habitat or genetic diversity which species would go extinct and which would survive.

"It almost seems like it's a random process," says Eske Willerslev, a palaeo-geneticist at the University of Copenhagen who led the study published online today in Nature1. "If you ran the whole experiment again, we would have woolly mammoths and no reindeer, so Santa would drag his sleigh with woolly mammoths."

...Some scientists, noting that modern humans were spreading throughout the world around this time, envisaged a blitzkrieg in which technologically savvy people hunted these animals to extinction. The end of an ice age and the habitat changes it wrought led other researchers to lay the blame on climate...

The researchers created a series of snapshots of the European, Asian and North American ranges of these animals (drawn from climate records and hundreds of fossils) and a rough approximation of their population size (based on ancient mitochondrial DNA sequences) between 42,000 and 6,000 thousand years ago...

The team found no way to predict the future extinction of a species, based on either an animal's genetic diversity or the size of its range.

(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...


TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: catastrophism; globalwarminghoax; godsgravesglyphs; greennewdeal; helixmakemineadouble; mammoth; mammoths; mastodon; mastodons; megafauna
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To: SunkenCiv
Another complex and sophisticated, but nevertheless spurious GIGO exercise.
Garbage In, Garbage Out...
21 posted on 11/04/2011 9:25:59 PM PDT by Publius6961 (My world was lovely, until it was taken over by parasites.)
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To: Ramius

Try the flooding of Lake Missoula and creation of the Columbia Gorge as one reason the Columbia wooly mamoth may have been wiped out. That was one epic (actually several) flood. Sixty MPH, and 200+ feet above current river levels. Boulders so large they were carried to the Oregon Coast Range.


22 posted on 11/04/2011 9:29:59 PM PDT by CT
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To: SunkenCiv

I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s an astonishing amount of mammoth ivory raw material available. Especially now that other forms of ivory are largely illegal, and mammoth tusks keep being found all over the artic in the U.S., Canada and Russia... It may not be exactly plentiful, but it is available. If you want a set of mammoth ivory grips for your Colt 1911... They can be found without much trouble.

The big difference is the quality of the ivory. Most of the mammoth ivory is yellowed, or has harsh grain, stains, and lots of marking in it. Dark stripes from cracks are common. What attracted me to the knife was the pure white ivory. In mammoth ivory I’ve seen, that’s fairly uncommon. That tells me they had a pretty special sample from which to make their handles.


23 posted on 11/04/2011 9:42:49 PM PDT by Ramius (personally, I give us... one chance in three. More tea?)
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To: CT

Are you talking about the flood from the break of the ice dam? If you’ve ever been to “dry falls” in WA, they figure that the canyon downstream of dry falls was formed all at once... Maybe a period of three or so DAYS, after the ice dam finally broke.

Amazing stuff.


24 posted on 11/04/2011 9:49:32 PM PDT by Ramius (personally, I give us... one chance in three. More tea?)
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To: SunkenCiv

Chunky Soup indeed.

25 posted on 11/05/2011 4:08:27 AM PDT by martin_fierro (< |:)~)
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To: Ramius

It sounds like a pretty sweet knife.


26 posted on 11/05/2011 5:59:21 AM PDT by EEGator
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To: American in Israel
There are two theoretical possibilities for flash freezing 6-10 ton beasties:

Velokovski's close approach of the protoplanet Venus (He correctly predicted both the temperature and composition of Venus’ atmosphere before any probes were sent. The prevailing view at that time was that Venus was a warmer version of Earth).

and;

The Northern Ice Cap had massive freshwater lakes - think the Great Lakes super sized - which collapsed into the warmer oceans sending water vapor into the stratosphere, which then fell back to Earth supercooled, flash freezing the beasts.

Theories abound, but none can be verified, currently.

27 posted on 11/05/2011 6:13:00 AM PDT by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now it is your turn ...)
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28 posted on 11/05/2011 6:16:31 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: martin_fierro

That didn’t work, but I love that page already.


29 posted on 11/05/2011 6:20:25 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: PIF; Fred Nerks

from “Earth in Upheaval” (p 3)

High in the north above Siberia, six hundred miles inside the Polar Circle, in the Arctic Ocean, lie the Liakhov Islands. Liakhov was a hunter who, in the days of Catherine II, ventured to these islands and brought back the report that they abounded in mammoths’ bones. “Such was the enormous quantity of mammoths’ remains that it seemed . . . that the island was actually composed of the bones and tusks of elephants, cemented together by icy sand.” 3

The New Siberian Islands, discovered in 1805 and 1806, as well as the islands of Stolbovoi and Belkov to the west, present the same picture. “The soil of these desolate islands is absolutely packed full of the bones of elephants and rhinoceroses in astonishing numbers.” 4


30 posted on 11/05/2011 6:24:25 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: SunkenCiv

Yeah, read most everything Velokovski wrote, but thanks.


31 posted on 11/05/2011 8:22:28 AM PDT by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now it is your turn ...)
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To: SunkenCiv

How you like me NOW.

32 posted on 11/05/2011 8:30:59 AM PDT by martin_fierro (< |:)~)
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To: PIF

This could be a good Catastrophism list ping as well, so, thanks. :’)


33 posted on 11/05/2011 9:01:36 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: martin_fierro

$10 a can, not bad.


34 posted on 11/05/2011 9:01:57 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: SunkenCiv

Ping me for both, and you are welcome!


35 posted on 11/05/2011 10:13:03 AM PDT by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now it is your turn ...)
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To: SunkenCiv

saw a show on cable the other day that posited a theory I hadn’t heard before.

The climte change enabled many different species and related members of similar species to wander onto territories where they had not previously existed.

This intermingling esposed them to germs to which they had not previously been exposed, killing whole populations of larger species from disease.


36 posted on 11/05/2011 1:58:42 PM PDT by wildbill (You're just jealous because the Voices talk only to me.)
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To: wildbill

That’s a nice story, but there’s no discernable evidence of a disease in the last mammoths. There is however evidence for sudden extinction. Yes, there were some isolated populations (dwarfed) which persisted until perhaps 2000 years ago, and the Earth can only show one face to the incoming space crud which was found embedded in the tusks of the last North American mammoths. :’)


37 posted on 11/05/2011 5:25:34 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: SunkenCiv
My folks just gave my son a book called "Dinosaurs for Kids," a creationist theory about how dinosaurs lived and eventually died out. My boy is five and I don't want to have to explain to him the mental gymnastics this author has to do to come up with his theories. There is even a picture of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with an apple and surrounded by dinosaurs.
38 posted on 11/05/2011 8:22:55 PM PDT by Sawdring
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To: Sawdring

There are other dino books he could also enjoy. :’)


39 posted on 11/05/2011 8:26:36 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (It's never a bad time to FReep this link -- https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: wildbill

This is Robert Bakker’s theory in his 1985 book “The Dinosaur Heresies”. Bakker notes that the mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous period did not occur at once but over a period of several million years.

Bakker speculated that because of continental drift historically isolated populations came into contact and thus succumbed to new diseases.

It’s not surprising that the climate change doomsayers borrowed his theory.


40 posted on 11/05/2011 8:46:22 PM PDT by KamperKen
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