Session Details

The end of the Pleistocene (roughly 60,000 - 11,000 years ago) was characterized by the selective extinction of much of the world's megafauna (terrestrial vertebrates > 44kg), including most of the large herbivores and carnivores from North America, Beringia, and South America. Large-scale extinctions are an important but still poorly understood evolutionary phenomenon and they do not always appear to correspond with major climatic or stratigraphic boundaries. As a consequence, there is great interest in how such extinctions occurred in the past and how they might occur again in the future, especially the mechanisms by which ecological systems rapidly become severely disrupted. The late Pleistocene extinctions provide an ideal example for investigation since the events are very recent, allowing the application of a variety of dating, modeling, and genetic analyses. Advances in molecular analysis and interpretation (including ancient DNA), the development of paleoclimatic, paleoenvironmental, and archaeological databases and refinements in climate niche modeling provide new tools and insights with which to study the timing, spatial patterns, and environmental conditions of the extinctions. This session will present new data from a wide range of scientific fields, geo-referenced datasets from across the world, and new data synthesis and analysis approaches, and will build on a recent NSF funded NESCent meeting on the same topic. The goal is to develop a conceptual and practical framework allowing the integration of data sets from disparate fields to investigate how large animals around the world became extinct.