I told a group of students a while ago that we had red pandas in North America until “relatively recently.” Big mistake. “Wait,” one stopped me. “What do you mean by ‘relatively recently?’” Oh, you know. 4.5 million years. I don’t know if paleo cultivates the temporal mind, or if the temporal […]
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
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
The horse has a complex and fascinating environmental history. Wild horses have become such an icon of the American west that it’s easy to forget that humans introduced them to the continent five hundred years ago, during European colonization. Horses quickly became part of Native American livelihoods and played an […]
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
What happens when large herbivores disappear from landscapes? Much of my research to date has used the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna as a natural experiment, documenting the cascading effects of the loss of large herbivores on the plant communities they left behind. To do this, I marshall the paleoecological […]
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Plants have sex. While flowers, cones, and fruits– basically the vaginas and uteruses of the plant world– feature prominently in human cultures, much of the actual, er, act of plant sex is invisible to us. As northerners dig out from under record-breaking snowfalls and eye the ground for the first crocuses and […]
Estimated reading time: 16 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
I am honored to join Scientopia for the next two weeks as a Guest Blogger! I’ve decided to devote my two-week tenure exploring plant-herbivore interactions (past and present) given that I’m thinking a lot these days about ecological anachronisms and how well large-fruited trees will be able to cope with […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
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