{"id":47617,"date":"2019-04-02T03:00:17","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T07:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=47617"},"modified":"2019-03-31T12:55:24","modified_gmt":"2019-03-31T16:55:24","slug":"the-not-so-ancient-extinction-of-madagascars-megafauna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/04\/02\/the-not-so-ancient-extinction-of-madagascars-megafauna\/","title":{"rendered":"The not-so-ancient extinction of Madagascar’s megafauna"},"content":{"rendered":"

At The Conversation<\/em>, Nick Scroxton, Laurie Godfrey, and Stephen Burns<\/a> discuss their new theory on the megafauna extinction in Madagascar just over a thousand years ago:<\/p>\n

Giant 10-foot-tall elephant birds, with eggs eight times larger than an ostrich\u2019s. Sloth lemurs bigger than a panda, weighing in at 350 pounds. A puma-like predator called the giant fosa.<\/p>\n

They sound like characters in a child\u2019s fantasy book, but along with dozens of other species, they once really roamed the landscape of Madagascar. Then, after millions of years of evolution in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the populations crashed in just a couple of centuries.<\/p>\n

Scientists know that over the past 40,000 years, most of Earth\u2019s megafauna \u2013 that is, animals human-size or larger \u2013 have gone extinct. Woolly mammoths, sabre tooth tigers and countless others no longer roam the planet.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s remarkable about the megafaunal crash in Madagascar is that it occurred not tens of thousands of years ago but just over 1,000 years ago, between A.D. 700 and 1000. And while some small populations survived a while longer, the damage was done in a relatively short amount of time. Why?<\/p>\n

Over the last three years, new investigations into climate and land use patterns, human genetic diversity on the island and the dating of hundreds of fossils have fundamentally changed scientists\u2019 understanding of the human and natural history of Madagascar. As two paleoclimatologists and a paleontologist, we brought together this research with new evidence of megafaunal butchery. In doing so we\u2019ve created a new theory of how, why and when these Malagasy megafauna went extinct.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Many of the forests that originally existed on Madagascar are now replaced by more open, human-modified landscapes, like this palm savanna at Anjohibe.
Laurie Godfrey, CC BY-ND<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At The Conversation, Nick Scroxton, Laurie Godfrey, and Stephen Burns discuss their new theory on the megafauna extinction in Madagascar just over a thousand years ago: Giant 10-foot-tall elephant birds, with eggs eight times larger than an ostrich\u2019s. Sloth lemurs bigger than a panda, weighing in at 350 pounds. A puma-like predator called the giant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[362,65,7,16],"tags":[245,924,1277,784,513],"class_list":["post-47617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-environment","category-history","category-science","tag-climatechange","tag-farming","tag-madagascar","tag-paleontology","tag-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-co1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47617"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47620,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47617\/revisions\/47620"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}