As a general rule, I care much more about the consequences of extinction than the causes. Even though I work on past landscapes, my mind is firmly rooted in the present, and I strive for my work to be relevant to. We know what’s causing extinctions today, for the most […]
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
As a scientist, there are places I want to visit one day because they feature heavily into the intellectual mythology of my field: Darwin’s Down House, Mount Chimborazo, the Galapagos. At the top of the list, my scientific Mecca has been the fossil-rich Pleistocene tar pits at Rancho La Brea. […]
Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
I’m at the Ecological Society of America meetings this week, so invited grad students Meghan Balk and Catalina Pimiento to write a guest post to coincide with Shark Week. Little did I know that this post would be so timely, with Discovery’s disastrous fake documentary on Megalodon! I hope you enjoy reading about these […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
“As I did stand my watch upon the hill, I looked toward Birnam, and anon methought the wood began to move.” – Messenger, Shakespeare’s Macbeth The simple story of the last 2.5 million years of vegetation response to climate change could be summed up like this: temperature goes up and down, plants […]
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Last month, I spent a couple of days in Oxford with a group of paleoecologists of many nationalities, timescales, and taxonomic foci, as we frantically narrowed down a list of more than nine hundred crowd-sourced questions to fifty. Our mission: to determine the most pressing, five-year-horizon-scanning questions in the field of […]
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
Paleoecological research involves equal parts detective work, mental time-travel, and story-telling. Clues from the past are collected and pieced together to map out what landscapes might have looked like, and how they may have changed through time. It’s not unlike walking through the set of a play after all the […]
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
The extinction of the ice-age megafauna is one of the most persistent (and contentious) problems in paleoecology. Since the 1960’s, the literature has been dominated by fierce debates about whether humans or climate change were responsible for the demise of the mammoths, mastodons, woolly rhinos, and other now-extinct megaherbivores and […]
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes