The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared PDF
Preview The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared
THE CAL L OF DISTANT MAMMOTHS PETER D. WARD THE CALL OF DISTANT MAMMOTHS Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared c SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC © 1997 Peter D. Ward Originally published by Copernicus in 1997 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. First softcover printing 1998. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ward, Peter Douglas, 1949- The call of distant mammoths : why the ice age mammals disappeared / Peter Douglas Ward, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-387-98572-5 ISBN 978-1-4612-1946-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4612-1946-0 1. Mastodon. 2. Extinction (Biology) I. Title. QE882.P8W37 1997 569'.67—DC21 96-48690 Printed on acid-free paper. Designed by Irmgard Lochner. Cover illustration by Alexis Rockman. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-0-387-98572-5 SPIN 10682969 For Chris, Nicholas, and the new one. Acknowledgments I would like to thank many people who helped in the writing and production of this book. Three stand out: Jerry Lyons and Bill Frucht, who showed me what really good editors can and should do; and Don Grayson, scientist and scholar. Grayson has defined the debate about overkill and given it meaning and substance. I would also like to thank the excellent production staff at Springer~Verlag, especially Vicky Evarretta. I apologize for the errors which probably will be found and hope that the imperfections of the writer are no greater than those of the fos~ sil record. Peter D. Ward Department of Geological Sciences University of Washington Seattle, Washington vii Contents Acknowledgments vii Prologue: The Elephants' Graveyard xi 1 The Time Machine 1 2 Heart of Darkness 24 3 When Worlds Collide 48 4 The Once and Future Kingdoms 68 5 Wheel of Fortune 88 6 The Hunger 118 7 The Kill Curve 166 8 The Lost World 192 9 Nevermore 202 10 The Smoking Gun 215 Afterword: 3001 221 References 225 Index 231 ix rl'· J 27.8 28.oe " SKULL OF SABER-TOOTHED TIGER, TOOTH OF MAMMOTH AND HORSE: ALL ICE-AGE uMEGAMAMMALS." Prologue: The Elephants' Graveyard T HERE IS A TALE TOLD to our children about a place deep in the jungle, where elephants go when they are ready to die. This place is called the Ele phant's Graveyard, and the story makes death seem dignified and peaceful. A gentle fairy tale, but is there a grain of truth involved? Elephant graveyards do exist. However, the real ones are not roman tic, nor are the deaths occurring there in any way gentle. Some of these graveyards are in the African and Asian jungles, or in the East and South African dry lands where the last elephants live wild today, and where ele phants do die, sometimes in large numbers, due to drought, starvation, or human poaching and predation. xi xii THE CALL OF DISTANT MAMMOTHS Yet, these killing fields in Africa and Asia are not the only elephant graveyards. Another kind exists in the geological record-the ancient rocky strata of past ages filled with fossils. These fossil elephant graveyards have been found the world over, telling us that once, not so long ago, every con tinent save Australia and Antarctica was the home of great elephants, and teaching us, as well, stark lessons about extinction. Finally, there is a third sort of elephant's graveyard, found not in Na ture present or past, but in the many Natural History Museums gracing this planet, such as the Burke Museum in Seattle where I work. The dead ele phants are brought for study and for safety to these museums. These elephant graveyards are perhaps closest in spirit to the children's tale, for here the bones of both the newly and long-dead elephants are indeed cared for and revered. I have visited such an Elephant's Graveyard each day, to be necessarily sur rounded by the bones of great elephants from the deep past. It has always been moving, but some days have been far more poignant than others. My steps echoed hugely as I descended into the stark stairwell, and not for the first time I reflected that a carpet would do wonders here. But this is not a flagship museum, neither Smithsonian nor American Museum of Natural History; it is a typical University Museum, operating on a star vation budget, run by part-time Academic Curators and volunteer labor. The ambiance is less than charming, if nevertheless familiar and utilitarian: here and there one can see a scurrying dermestid beetle (a verminous es capee from the Zoology Department's efforts to strip flesh from bones), while the air yields equal parts of ancient fossil dust and formaldehyde. I reached my floor, deep in the windowless basement of the building, and passed through the featureless halls with fluorescent tubes overhead. I saw our Cu rator of Paleobotany, in a nearby room, moving rock-filled boxes, and far ther down the hall our usually nocturnal Curator of Arachnids sat in his arthropodan lair, surrounded by thousands of spiders, alive and dead. My own mission this day was somewhat different from my normal routine, for I had just received a large fossil tooth, a piece of beach wrack coming from Prologue: The Elephants' Graveyard xiii the towering gravel cliffs near the Olympic Mountains of Washington State. It is a relict of the dead, exhumed from its 11,000 year-old grave site by the wind and waves of Puget Sound, and found by an aging beach comber. It has now come to me, and it is my duty to bury such fossils once again, to give them a new resting place, this time not in stony soil but in a tall, gray sarcophagus built by the Lane Scientific Company. Instead of a headstone, these rocks from the Ice Age are given a number, and some vague sort of immortality as electronic life on a large database. It had come to me as so many of these lithic fragments do, not from an organized paleontological dig but from another phone call. Arriving in my cavernous room, I switched on the lights overhead, re vealing the great boneyard around me. This particular room is the final rest ing place for all of the great skeletons discovered over the decades by both amateur and professional paleontologists of Washington State. The harsh light etches vertebrae and ribs, leering skulls and horns from the near and distant past. But the most striking and spectacular objects in the room are the great ivory tusks-curving, giant elephant-like tusks, far larger than any elephant tusk of today and in unlike shapes-for this room is filled with the remains of mammoths and mastodons from the Ice Age. It is to this grave yard that I have brought a new piece of the old. Starting the slow process of curation, I replayed in my mind the events just transpired two floors above. The telephone call had come the previous day. Being one of the few paleontologists in a state exacts its own unique price to pay, for to the un numbered children in my state, every round rock is a hopeful dinosaur egg, every old decaying cow bone the humerus of an Allosaurus, every stony shell the promise of an ancient world; yet sometimes, just sometimes, these ex travagant promises tum out to be correct. Thus, I never refuse the phone calls about some newly dreamed dragon, for the rare dragon bones do exist, to be disinterred each spring by the steady Northwest rain. So I had answered the phone, to receive a most unusual request. A woman caller hoped that I could see her father. He was terminally ill with cancer and in his eighties. Furthermore, could I see him ... soon. I asked
The list of books you might like
