Latest Pleistocene extinctions Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of scientists, led by North-Eastern Federal University of Russia, have discovered frozen woolly mammoth fragments that could contain living cells deep in Siberia, bringing closer the possibility of cloning the extinct animals. This sounds like a twisted mammalian version of Jurassic Park, but it isn't fiction. According to the Associated Press, the team discovered mammoth hair, soft tissues and bone marrow at...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A human skull that was recently found in Southeast Asia provides new details in the story of modern man’s migration out of Africa, through Asia, and beyond to the Pacific. While anthropologists have long theorized that humans emerged from Africa and into East and Southeast Asia around 60,000 years ago, there has been a significant lack of fossil evidence to support these claims. The earliest skull fossil evidence in the region had...
Wits' scientists are part of the most comprehensive research to come out of Olduvai in East Africa since the early 1980s The first systematic, multidisciplinary results to come out of research conducted on the edge of the Serengeti at the rich palaeoanthropological site in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania since that produced by Louis and Mary Leakey's team, have recently been published in a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Human Evolution. Professor Marion Bamford, deputy...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of scientists has reconstructed the dietary preferences of 3 groups of hominins found in South Africa. The paper, “Evidence for diet but not landscape use in South African early hominins," is a joint effort between the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Université de Toulouse Paul Sabatier, and the University of the Witwatersrand and has been selected for Advanced Online Publication in the journal Nature. The...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As the human and primate fossil records become more complete, researchers are beginning to see the amount of complexity involved in man’s evolution. That evolutionary tree became even more complex with the discovery of new fossils that suggest there were two additional Homo species living alongside our direct ancestors, Homo erectus, around two million years ago. According to a report published in the journal Nature this week,...
COLLEGE STATION, Texas, June 27, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --Australopithecus sediba, believed to be an early relative of modern-day humans, enjoyed a diet of leaves, fruits, nuts, and bark, which meant they probably lived in a more wooded environment than is generally thought, a surprising find published in the current issue of Nature magazine by an international team of researchers that includes a Texas A&M University anthropologist. (Logo:...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com New evidence points to a dual conspiracy of climate change factors and hunting activities by early man that to drove the woolly mammoth to extinction between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago. The gradual decline of the sub-Arctic giant was likely caused in part by global warming induced changes in habitat, according to a new report published by an American-led research team in Nature Communications this week. These changes included a decline in the mammoths' food...
Although humans and woolly mammoths co-existed for millennia, the shaggy giants disappeared from the globe between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, and scientists couldn't explain until recently exactly how the Flinstonian behemoths went extinct. In a paper published June 12 in the journal Nature Communications, UCLA researchers and colleagues reveal that not long after the last ice age, the last woolly mammoths succumbed to a lethal combination of climate warming, encroaching humans and...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Scientists may have finally established the explanation for the disappearance of the giant koala and other Australian megafauna. Between 50,000 and 45,000 years ago, around 60 species of mammals, predominantly foraging herbivores called browsers, went extinct. These animals included 19 species that weighed over 100 kilograms, like the rhinoceros-sized giant wombat and half-ton marsupial Palorchestes azael. Slightly smaller animals like the flightless bird...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com A man in Iowa has discovered the remains of a woolly mammoth that laid to rest thousands of years ago in his backyard. The man, identified only as John, said that one of his sons found something while walking in the forest behind their property in 2010, and John realized that the object was a bone. “I got down on my hands and knees on the bank, and I could see a marrow line around the edge of this, and I said, ‘Boys, that’s a bone. That’s a really...
Latest Pleistocene extinctions Reference Libraries
Commonly known as the Eurasian cave lion or the European cave lion, Panthera leo spelaea is an extinct subspecies of lion. It is thought to have lived during the Pleistocene epoch, and may have lived in the Balkans in southeastern Europe until 2,000 years ago. The range of this cave lion would have included northwestern North America, Asia, and areas of Europe and would have extended from Germany, Spain, and Great Britain to the Yukon Territory. Its range also extended from Turkistan to...
The stag-moose (Cervalces scotti) is also known as the stag moose and was actually a deer that resembled a moose. It resided in North America during the Pleistocene era. Its range included New Jersey and Iowa, reach north from Arkansas to Southern Canada. It inhabited wetlands in these areas. This animal had long legs, a head resembling an elk, and huge, complex antlers. The stag-moose became extinct during the mass extinction of large mammals that occurred in the last Ice Age on North...
The shrub-ox (Euceratherium collinum) is a close relative of the modern musk-ox, and is an extinct member of the family Bovidae. It inhabited North America during the late Pleistocene, appearing before the first bovids entered North America from Eurasia. These muskoxen became extinct approximately 11,500 years ago. The shrub-ox was very large, approximately in between the sizes of a musk-ox and an American Bison. Research done on pellets left by these oxen shows that they browsed for food...
Harlan’s muskox (Bootherium bombifrons) is an extinct type of bovine, also known as the woodland muskox. It lived in North American during the late Pleistocene era, and was one of the most widely distributed oxen at that time. This bison died out around 11,000 years ago. Many fossils of Harlan’s muskox have been found in New Jersey, Texas, Oklahoma, Alaska, and California, including a nearly complete individual found in 1940. Three other types of muskoxen inhabited North America...
The steppe wisent (Bison priscus) or steppe bison was common to North America, Central Asia, Europe, and Beringia during the Quaternary period. It is thought that the steppe bison appeared around the same time as the aurochs , an extinct type of cattle, in Asia. Descendants of the steppe bison are often confused with the aurochs species. During the late Pleistocene era, the steppe wisent became extinct, giving rise to the modern wisent in Europe, and eventually the modern Bison in America....
