The Zoologist Who Cried Climate Change

Why did the mammoth go extinct? Why are there no longer lions in Europe? Why is the largest predator in Australia a smallish dog? There is a clear and concise explanation for every last one of these extinctions, backed up by a great deal of evidence: In North America, the mammoths and lions disappeared within centuries of humans first arriving, in Europe they lasted until warming temperatures improved conditions for people, and on their last island refugees, such as Wrangel island off the coast of Siberia, they lasted until just 4000 years ago, when finally, people arrived there too. A similar story is seen in Australia. When humans first arrived 50,000 years ago, the native megafauna of the continent immediately collapsed, leaving only a few medium sized marsupials, such as the thylacine, as the biggest predators on the continent. Later, a new wave of people arrived, this time bringing more advanced weapons and, crucially, dogs, resulting in the extinction of all thylacine populations save the one on Tasmania, where dingos the never reached.

The evidence for this scenario is clear and conclusive, backed up by multiple studies and seen across the world. The unique birds of New Zealand were doing just fine until 800 years ago, when the first Maori arrived and promptly proceeded to wipe nearly all of the flightless and many of the flighted species out. When the Europeans arrived several centuries later, they merely finished the job. The megafauna of South America, once the most biodiverse in the world, died out within centuries of humans arriving, after having endured millions of years of ecological and climatic upheavals with little to no effect. The giant lemurs and fossas of Madagascar were eradicated shortly after the arrival of the first humans 3000 years ago, and the few and tiny populations of elephant birds that had managed to cling on disappeared once again after the coming of the Europeans. Arguably most famous of all recent extinctions is that of the dodo, though what fewer people know is that the dodo shared its island home of Mauritius with a wide variety of odd and endemic species, including giant turtles and multiple other species of flightless birds, all of which were wiped out shortly after people came.

This does not seem like a complicated issue - quite the opposite in fact. Every time humans arrive on a new landmass, the result has been an immediate wave of extinctions. This is seen across the whole world, and evidence for it is ample. Surely, nobody would be naive or stubborn enough to contest this, right? As we will soon see, the bounds of human incredulity and denial are truly limitless.

Raphus cucullatus, the famous dodo. Once abundant across its habitat, it is now, as the saying goes, "dead as a dodo"

Where did the wild horse go?

Tarpan. Isn't it an evocative word? It brings to mind images of wild horses, untamed by man, of fierce stallions and galloping herds. When it comes to wild horses in Europe, "Tarpan" is the go to term. Unfortunately, it is also one shrouded in controversy, and for one simple reason: nobody really knows what it means. It seems simple enough - the Tarpan is another word for the European wild horse, right? Well... kinda. Sometimes. It is certainly true that the undomesticated horses which roamed Europe in prehistory are commonly referred to as Tarpans, but the problem is that the designation is not exclusively limited to them - nor necessarily should it be. If Tarpan is a word for the European wild horse, then it should apply to all members of that species, regardless of when they lived. The factor that complicates everything and throws this neat and tidy definition out of the window can be summarized neatly in one word: Interbreeding.

Europe has been home to domestic horses for a long time, and for the entirety of their time coexisting with their wild relatives, interbreeding has most likely occurred. Now, at first this was not an issue, since the populations of (mostly) pure wild horses were so larger that the genes of a few domestics did not have much of an impact. As time went on however, and the wild horse populations plummeted, this genetic balance was lost. Suddenly there were significantly more domestic horses than wild ones, and in times of war or simply due to accidents, domestics were often abandoned and left to their own devices, resulting in them becoming feral. This is where the boundary between wild horses and domestics becomes incredibly blurred, and where the word Tarpan really starts to grow sketchy. Historical observers from centuries passed were rarely detail-orientated enough to take note of the subtle morphological distinctions that separated wild horses and domestics, so whenever a herd of wild-living horses was spotted, these animals were simply referred to as wild, and sometimes, you guessed it, "Tarpans". This makes it very difficult to ascertain whether any given historical account of wild horses living in an area actually refer to true, undomesticated horses, or simply feral descendants of domestics. To make matters even more complicated, as mentioned before, extensive interbreeding took place, and in the latter years of the wild horse's existence, it is plausible if not almost certain that very nearly all populations of so-called Tarpans were either hybrids or pure domestic animals, with very few pure wild types remaining. This is often referred to as the only known picture of a Tarpan, but looking at its morphology, the animal shown is almost certainly either a hybrid or a pure domestic, as it bares very little resemblance to neither the skeletons we have of European wild horses, nor the extant and closely related Przewalski's horses.

To add one final layer of complexity and doubt to the word "Tarpan", today it is often used to refer to certain "primitive" breeds of domestic horses, particularly the Konik Polski. Koniks are one of several breeds often claimed to be either direct descendants of wild horses, or, in the Konik's case, a deliberate back-breeding attempt that incorporated hybrids of wild and domestic animals, thus resulting in a breed almost identical to the original wild horse. While the Konik is undeniably a sturdy and "wild"-looking breed, its morphology, like that of the animal in the picture claimed to be a Tarpan, and all other modern horse breeds, does not match that of the wild horse. Genetic tests have shown that it is no more closely related to wild horses than any other modern breed, and the story of it being a back-breeding attempt has been demonstrated to be a myth. In reality, the Konik is simply a particularly hardy breed originally used as draft animals in their native Poland, where the breed presumably originated, which just so happens to somewhat resemble the original wild horse. And yet, regardless of everything I just told you, the Konik is still often referred to as a Tarpan, including by organizations such as Rewilding Europe.

Pictured: Not Tarpans, but instead a herd of Przewalski's horses, the world's only still extant species of wild horse.

Accepting The Consequences

We - or most of us at least - live in cultivated, domestic landscapes. The places in which we live are molded and shaped by human action, and what wildness does exist persists where we have allowed it - or failed to notice it. It is upon this backdrop of suburbs and cities, of supermarkets and cornfields, that most conservation must take place. This is not necessarily a good thing, but it is an undeniable fact of reality. Even in the most distant corners of most countries, anthropogenic influences are still ever-present, and there are people trying to make a living. There are spots, some larger and some smaller, where people are mostly absent, but rarely wholly. In the Scottish highlands, shepherds make their living, in the north of Scandinavia, Sami herd reindeer, and in the Balkan mountains, hunters and farmers base their livelihoods off the land. Here in Denmark, while we have several areas of relatively wild and connected landscapes - significantly more than most people realize - these are still generally used by at least some people. Most of our forests are logged, either by the state or private landowners, our meadows are grazed by livestock and bordered by intensively managed agriculture, and even our biggest and wildest places, such as the hinterlands of the Jutlandic west coast, are often used by the military as training areas. Sometimes these human activities are mostly unrelated to and unaffected by whatever conservation may be taking place. Sometimes the human activities may be directly dependent on them, but in most cases this does not hold true, and in all cases, the presence of people must be taken into account.

I write about this in part because I have recently been reading and listening to a wide variety of perspectives on conservation and nature, and in part due to the influence that a book by the name of Landmarks, written by Robert Macfarlane, has had on me. The book I will return to later, but for now I will focus on these differing perspectives. It is awfully easy to surround yourself in an echo chamber, an environment in which only agreeing opinions are heard, and in which arrogance and negligence often blossoms. I am, as readers of this blog will probably know, a big advocate of rewilding, and the radical forms of it at that. I follow the movement attentively, and generally have much less interest in traditional conservation, as I see it, to put it bluntly, as a failed attempt, in many cases not worth continuing. This is not of course a commonly held opinion, and even rewilding as a whole is still a relatively niche part of conservation, albeit one which is rapidly expanding. When reading about subjects such as rewilding, about reintroductions and habitat restoration, it is easy only to see the sources you agree with, and become distant to all dissenting voices. It is not that you do not know that they're there, that you don't realize there are people who disagree - of course you do, they're the obstacle that must be overcome for conservation to take place. And that's just it. These dissenting voices, these people who disagree, or at the very least take issue with some parts of conservation and rewilding, they are quickly reduced from real, flesh and blood individuals, with their own motives, worries and passions, to nothing but "obstacles", problems that must be overcome for real, true progress to be achieved. 

A natural area, part of a reserve in fact, nonetheless clearly influenced and surrounded by human activities. Image from http://www.samlesbury.org.uk

Rebuilding Australia: How reintroductions and introduced species could help save a continent's wildlife

I am not from Australia, so I have no doubts that whatever I say will be dismissed by at least some people as just the ramblings of an uninformed foreigner. They may be right, but I would like to think that at least some subjects can be mostly, though not entirely, learned from reading and thinking. I have written about Australia before, and in fact I have something of a fascination with the continent for a variety of reasons. One is the most obvious; from a wildlife perspective, Australia is unlike any other continent on present day Earth. The marsupial faunas that (used to) dominate there are the last remaining on the planet, after South America's collision with North America essentially ended the age of marsupials there, and the general cooling of the global climate wiped them out on most continents. In this respect, it offers us something of a look back at earlier times, and gives us a window into the past diversity that marsupials once enjoyed across so much of the world. There is another reason for my fascination with Australia however. It is the only tropical first world country, and certainly the least densely populated one. The great majority of Australia is still wilderness in one form or another. A rich country with magnitudes of uncultivated wilderness and an iconic endemic fauna, that sounds like a great thing, doesn't it? Most of the problems facing wildlife in other tropical countries are at least partly a result of the widespread poverty and corruption in said countries, and while Australia cannot necessarily be completely cleared of the later, it is certainly nowhere near as extreme as in most countries with similar climatic conditions and quantities of wilderness. You would think that the Land Down Under would be an ideal place for nature, a country with a great fauna wealthy enough to protect it. So why is everything going so horribly?

With 11% of its mammalian fauna extinct within just the last few centuries, it has the highest rate of mammal extinctions in the world. On top of that, 15% of the remaining species are also endangered, with more yet more on the verge of being so. All in all, things are not going well for Australia's mammals. The typical explanation for this is that, as an isolated island continent, Australia's endemics are especially vulnerable to introduced species. It was the foxes, goats, and horses that did it, or so the story goes. In this post I will be arguing against that prevailing idea, and continuing on my previous post on Australia in arguing that invasive species are merely a symptom of a wider problem, and that a few of the introductions may in fact be part of the solution.

Australia: Land of marsupials, especially extinct ones.

Remembering the past, Letting go of the present, Embracing the future

We don't like change. That is understandable, from an evolutionary perspective whatever situation we are currently in is obviously one that is keeping us alive, and as a result, any potential deviation could be dangerous. If our environment at present is adequately supplying us with food, water, and all our other basic needs, any changes, even those that could be positive, are still bringing risk where there previously was none. An old saying is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and that particular mentality may be more deeply ingrained in us than we tend to realize. However, as with so many other parts of our biology, our way of life has changed so radically in such a short span of time that evolution has not yet had time to catch up, and this "now good, change bad" mentality seems to be a leftover from our hunter-gatherer past, and a dangerous one at that. We no longer live in the relatively stable environment we evolved in - change is constant in the modern world, and so attempting to ensure that present conditions prevail is inevitably futile. On top of this, mirroring the changes we have dealt to our own lifestyles, the influences and alterations we have induced upon the natural world within just a few thousand years are vast, so vast in fact that we almost certainly have yet to even fully grasp the consequences of what we have done. The main reason for this is that nature is slow to react - or rather, we are incredibly quick to act. Typically in nature, even if changes in the environment send a species spiraling towards extinction, it can still take thousands if not millions of years before the last individuals die. Likewise, changes in climate almost always cause drastic shifts in faunal and floral communities, but these shifts are not instantaneous. Plants are long-lived and slow to disperse, and so it is not unusual to find communities of plants growing in places where others could grow as well if not better.

What I am trying to get at by saying all this is that even though many of our impacts on the environment are already obvious, their repercussions may take hundreds if not thousands of years to fully manifest. In some cases we can already predict future changes even though they have not yet occurred. An example of this would be several of the species of birds living in our farmlands throughout Europe. Today we associate them with this intensively managed landscape, but comparing present populations to past ones, a downward trend quickly becomes obvious. The populations living in farmlands today are not so much adapted to that habitat as they are relics of a time when different conditions prevailed, mainly the ages before intensive agriculture and pesticides. In time, they will die out, unless another change occurs. The significance of this should be obvious, as it means that we need to be very careful when determining what is in fact any given species' ideal habitat. In Denmark the Goldcrest may almost exclusively live in plantations of non-native conifers, yes, but this is probably a result of the destruction of all native pine forests, not an actual preference for conifer plantations, an environment that does not occur naturally, and thus could never be the ancestral habitat of the Goldcrest anyway. In summary, the present is not nearly as stable as many of us seem to think it is, and any attempts to preserve current conditions on a large scale are inevitably doomed to fail. As we will soon see however, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

A thought experiment in the Highlands

Much ink has been spilled over the merits and flaws of rewilding. It is a concept which I have come out in support of multiple times before, though I take issue with many of the claims and arguments made by some so-called "rewilders". One of the main points of disagreement between advocates and opponents of rewilding has been as to what impacts simply letting nature reassert itself would have. Some people say that it would be negative, that human activities are necessary for the preservation of our ecosystems, while others say that it is unquestionably a positive, that can only serve to better our wildlife. Both of these positions are of course extremes, and most people lie somewhere in between, but they give a  general idea of what the sides are. To actually answer the question is a difficult if not impossible task, as it would depend on a wide variety of factors. Whether reintroductions are considered a necessary part of rewilding, for instance, completely changes what results said process would have. In this post, I will indulge in a thought experiment of sorts, centered on the British highlands: What if all farming along with most other human activity everywhere in the uplands was stopped, and deer numbers were heavily culled and kept at bay. No reintroductions, no direct action aside from the culling, just a complete ceasing of all activities in the highlands. I do not actually advocate this scenario, nor do I find it remotely plausible, but it offers some idea of what the outcome of one extreme form of rewilding would be. As we will eventually see, it also shows why reintroductions are in fact necessary for rewilding and habitat restoration in the long term, and that "grazing bad, trees good" is not always true.

The British highlands as they appear today, beautiful but lifeless

Elephants Of Antiquity

Elephants, members of the group proboscidea, are beloved by everyone; they are big, charismatic, and essential keystone species throughout their native range, even in the places where they are now extinct. Once one of the most widely distributed groups of large herbivorous mammals on the planet, they are now confined to tropical Asia and Africa, and even then just barely in many places. I have mentioned them before when talking about some of the regions which they once inhabited, but never in great detail. That changes now, and in this post I hope to cover pretty much the entire native range of proboscideans on all continents, focusing mostly on those now extinct. Just to clarify briefly what I mean when I say "native", while the term has no true agreed upon meaning, for the sake of this post I will define it as any animal which is currently or would still have been present in an area, if not for human activity. Another fact that must be mentioned is that the terms "proboscidean" and "elephant" do not mean the same. All elephants are proboscideans, but not all proboscideans are elephants. The proboscidean family tree is typically divided into two main groups, the elephants and the mastodons, which split early on in their history. So, with that settled, let us begin with the two places where elephants are still present.

Proboscidean cladogram, by Vladimir Nikolov

Exploring the natural land cover of Europe

How would Europe have looked if we had never come along? This subject has been covered before, specifically as goes the fauna, but today I will be tackling a different side of this, namely how the landscape itself would have looked. Traditionally imagined as a dense, continent-wide closed canopy forest, this view now seems unlikely, but precisely how it looked is difficult to assess, simply due to our lack of clear evidence. Despite this, enough data is available to give us a general picture of roughly how it may have looked, even if a large amount of educated guesses and inferences are required. The importance of discussing this subject must not be understated, as it is absolutely vital to conservation and habitat restoration. As has been covered here, trying to protect and restore the wrong habitats can have a devastating effect on wildlife, as demonstrated by the stark decline in many species caused by the intensive management of heaths throughout much of the continent. To understand how best to protect species we must first know what their natural habitats were, and in what conditions they once thrived. In this post, I will be covering the continent in general, but again with a stronger focus on western Europe, as this is where most attempted habitat restoration is currently taking place and where data is most plentiful.

Old-growth beech forest in Slovakia, often but mistakenly used as a model for all pristine European habitats

For All To See: Overgrazing apologists and regressive conservation

I have talked about the British highlands before, discussing its depleted state, and how it came to be this way. In that article I also devoted a substantial quantity of words to how conservationists have, for a long time, been helping preserve this depleted landscape. None of this has radically changed in the few months since I wrote that post, nor is the subject of today any more relevant now than it was then. It is also not any less relevant however. What I will be talking about here is the issue of those conservationists who have not moved on, who still cling to the old and outdated notions of what is and is not good for nature. They are unfortunately still large in number, and often fill some of the most powerful positions in conservation, controlling the majority of nature reserves. Change is coming, but as with all upheavals, there will be resistance, and much of it at that. Still, there is something uncannily disturbing about a conservationist, supposedly bolstered and driven by science, trumpeting blatantly and demonstrably false statements, so heavily contradicted by evidence, much of which they must be aware of, to border on outright lying. This post is both a rebuttal to the arguments made by these people, and also a reflection on just why they are acting the way they are, and how we may perhaps be able to change it in time.

A picture of the desolate Scottish highlands, one of many in this post, with sheep in the foreground

Lands Pristine: Europe during the Eemian

Previously I have spoken about prehistoric Australia in great length, namely here and here, and recently wrote an in-depth post about ancient California. Pre-Human Europe however has been something of a neglected subject, despite also being the one I have the greatest interest in. I have mentioned details about it in passing, but now is its time in the limelight.

When people think of prehistoric Europe, they typically picture the early Holocene, covered here, but as that post discusses, the pristine European wilderness was already gone by then. No, to see Europe as it would still have looked today if not for our presence, one must go back to the Eemian, also known as the last interglacial. Spanning from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, it was the last point in time when the climate resembled todays, but the megafauna had not yet died out. All of the modern species we know today already existed, and at a cursory glance it would have looked quite similar, but the Eemian was to modern Europe what present day southern Africa is to its northern counterpart, an unspoilt, pristine version of the latter, in which the now vanished giants were not just present, but dominated the landscape. In this post I will be covering primarily western Europe, as that is the place with which I am most familiar, and we will explore a Europe quite different from what we know today.

Trafalgar Square, 130,000 years ago, by Roman Uchytel

A World In The Tar Pits: California before Humans

California is known for many things; Hollywood, Silicon valley, and more recently unprecedented droughts. What it is less known for however, at least to the general public, is the vast diversity of life that once lived there. Located in California lie the La Brea tar pits, which are, as the name suggests, a group of tar pits, that have been trapping animals for the last 40,000 years, giving us an incredibly detailed view into the paleofauna of the region. Perhaps the best site for late Pleistocene animals in the world, it certainly contains some of the most spectacular creatures. From giant ground sloths and saber toothed cats to mammoths and mastodons, prehistoric California had one of the most diverse megafaunal assemblages in the world, far outmatching that of even Africa, both today and in the Pleistocene. In this post we will be travelling back 11,000 years, shortly after the end of the ice age, and right before the arrival of the first humans.

Paleoenvironment of La Brea, by Charles Knight. The animals in the foreground are the sabertooth Smilodon, Harlan's ground sloth, and the giant vulture Teratornis. In the background can be seen a herd of Columbian mammoths. 

Big cats of Europe - past and present

British big cats, German big cats, Danish big cats, French big cats. Every European country seems to be reporting sightings of mysterious, large, often black cats nowadays. Of course, in the vast majority of cases, these are either hoaxes or misidentification, the fact that melanistic animals are most often reported, despite being far rarer than individuals of normal colouration, should itself be a clue to this reality. Whatever the case. some of these sightings have possibly been of real big cats. In central Europe for instance, lynx are fairly widespread, and to a person unfamiliar with the animal, could quite convincingly appear as a leopard or jaguar. These sightings are less tenable on the British isles, but even in Scotland wildcats are present, if barely, and hybrids between them and domestics are often significantly larger than your average housecat. Barring the occasional zoo or circus escapee however, the only true big cats to be encountered in present day Europe is the aforementioned lynx. But this was not always the case. Today I will be talking about the history of big cats in Europe since the last interglacial, their distribution, diversity, success, and eventual downfall by way of spears and bows.

An Eurasian lynx, the only real big cat left in Europe

Frozen in time: The illusion of stable ecological communities and the geological perspective

Evolution as a process is, at its most basic level, relatively easy to understand: Slow adaptation over many generations favoring forms more well suited to their environment. This is of course so overly simplified as to border on flat out inaccuracy, there are so many complicated processes at play in evolution that one could not possibly do them all justice in a brief summary. The point however stands that the general perception of what evolution broadly speaking is can be defined as an endless process of refinement. We tend to perceive the species that exist today as perfectly adapted to their environments, fully capable of persisting and surviving on their own. After all, if this was not the case, how could they even be here in the first place? This mindset is not necessarily wrong at face value, species must be competitive in order in order to persist. The issue here is the lack of perspective. Species and populations that may seem stable and self-sustaining in the short term may actually be in a state of chronic decline over a longer course of time. The lifespan of an individual person is so fleeting compared to the vastness of deep time, that perceiving such declines is essentially impossible without the benefit of hindsight.

When we look at a pristine forest, an un-managed oldgrowth, we see a vast and complex community of plants and animals, each fulfilling its own role in the ecosystem. Trees of varies species tower above us, often forming dense stands, seemingly impenetrable and ageless. Yet this is an illusion. Pollen cores and fossil evidence clearly shows that forests, and all other ecosystems for that matter, are in a state of constant flux, everchanging, but on a timescale too slow for us to perceive. The communities of trees that a person visiting a Himalayan forest today might see would be almost wholly different from that experienced by a person walking through the same area just a few thousand years prior. But this state of constant change is not just an endless reshuffling, many species once common are now gone, and many that we today would consider "staples" of the forests will no longer be here millennia in the future.

Relict lineages and late surviving species

We all know how the story of a species goes; At some point it evolves, arising from a previous ancestor. Maybe it thrives and spreads far and wide, or maybe it remains restricted to a small area, persisting in relatively low numbers. If it does gain a wide distribution, it will probably split into multiple subspecies, and eventually, some of these may themselves evolve into what we would term a new species. Eventually however, animals recognizable as members of the original species will go extinct, descendants or no descendants. They disappear from the world, their role in the ecosystem taken by other creatures, or perhaps left vacant if said niches no longer exist. Whatever the case, they are gone. But the borders between extinction and survival are not as solid as many people think. First off, we have the aforementioned situation in which a parent species gives rise to further descendants. If the wild Grey wolf went extinct, Canis lupus would still persist in the form of the Domestic dog and Dingo, and any descendants that they may have. In this way, species with descendants never really go "extinct" in the technical sense, their lineage is carried on, but the distinct morphology and ecology is still lost. Another form of not-quite extinction is called Functional Extinction, when individuals of a species are still present, but persist at so low numbers that they will never be able to recover, and are doomed to eventually die out. An example of this would be the Thylacine, which while officially extinct by 1933, probably continued to persist in low numbers until at least the 50s. Despite this, the species itself was probably functionally extinct as early as the beginning of the 1930s, and by the time the last captive individual, Benjamin, died, the species had already been doomed to extinction for a while.

The type of not-quite extinction I will be talking about today is the concept of relict lineages, groups which, while long past their glory days, still exist in the form of at least a single species. For me to consider a lineage "relict", it must be represented by only a few species, typically only one, and must be in constant but slow decline. Relict lineages can persist for a relatively long time after the rest of their relatives die out, and these few remaining species are termed "late survivors", but if they continue for too long, say more than 5 million years, they are clearly capable of adapting and diversifying, almost certainly possessing quite a large population, and thus not properly considered "relict". In this post, I will be going over some hypothetical late survivors, how and when they may have lived, and why we don't know about them.

The early Holocene of Europe - from 11,000 to 6000 BP

The Quaternary extinction is a much talked about subject today, as it is both fascinating in the context of prehistory, and simultaneously important in modern conservation. Typically defined as the rapid decline in global biodiversity during the late Pleistocene up until present, it is sometimes referred to as the sixth mass extinction in earth's history, the previous one wiping out the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Personally, I dislike the term Quaternary extinction. The event mostly occurred within the last 50,000 years, making the term "Quaternary" odd, since the Pliocene and majority of the Pleistocene was not involved. Some have also referred to it as the Pleistocene extinction, which is equally incorrect, as it has continued up until the present. I prefer the term "Anthropogenic extinction", and have used it previously, as I believe it is more apt. It ignores the timeframe in which it has occurred, instead describing the primary causal factor, humans.

While it is true that the most dramatic of the Anthropogenic extinctions occurred either during the late Pleistocene or around the industrial revolution, in this post I will be focusing on a very different, but in some ways even more significant period, the early Holocene. The early Holocene is special in that it represents a relatively brief span of time, approximately 5000 years, in which environmental conditions were similar to today, yet direct human influence on the landscape was not. Instead, the most major human influences during the early Holocene were the same as those during the Pleistocene - hunting. While many of the most important megafauna were already gone by the time the Holocene began, several were not, and for just a few thousand years, we got a glimpse of something similar to what the world may have looked like had humans not existed.

Alien species and the future ecology of Australia

First off, the next post will be about prehistory, I promise, this is the last conservation related post for a while. With that said, buckle in, as this is going to be a long one.

Species disperse, this is an universally accepted part of ecology and evolution. Eventually animals will spread from one area to another, and if the conditions in this new habitat are different enough that they favor unique adaptations, evolution will occur, possibly resulting in the creation of a new subspecies. When animals naturally disperse, we tend not to have a problem with it, at least in most cases. Take for instance the Cattle egret. This small Heron has rapidly spread to colonize most of the world, while even just a century ago it was mostly restricted to Africa. This seems to have been completely by its own doing, and thus we have allowed it. Another example of this is the Turtle dove, which rapidly spread from western Asia to most of Europe within a few decades, though it is now declining again.

The Cattle egret, conqueror of the world

The world that we forgot

Humans are an inherently short sighted species. We do not think too far into the future, and rarely gaze much further back than our youth. At most, the average person thinks a few decades forward, and a century back, anything beyond that is largely forgotten, or ignored. For conservationists protecting nature, this cone of vision is slightly less narrow, often looking an entire century forward, and sometimes upwards of 500 years back. This allows them to view the general trends these last few centuries have experienced. But it is still a narrow view, and still does not offer one crucial thing; Perspective. Most conservation efforts focus either on preserving areas as they are today, or turning them back at most a few hundred years. Often the time just before the industrial revolution is used as a target, an ideal. In this post I will discuss why to properly conserve nature, one must look much further back, and how this lack of perspective and vision is choking nature today.

The Cairngorms of eastern Scotland

Dawn of Dragons: The life and ecology of early Pterosaurs

Pterosaurs are a very well known group, both fossil-wise and through popculture. While Pteranodon is by far the most well known, Pterosaurs are actually quite diversely represented in popculture, as genera such as Dimorphodon, Rhamphorhynchus, and Quetzalcoatlus are also quite common sights. During most of the Mesozoic, these flying beasts were the rulers of the skies, with global distributions and an incredible diversity of species. But we are not going to talk about the later members of the group today, at least not most of them. This post is about the earliest Pterosaurs, how they lived, and where they came from, for while the media and documentaries tend to focus on the most impressive beasts, the early members of this group were just as interesting in their own right, and offer us an unique look into the evolution of flight.

Hypothetical proto-pterosaur, by Mark Witton

Life and death in the Wessex Formation

The Wessex Formation is a geological formation dating back to the early Cretaceous, 130 million years ago. It is a part of the Wealden Group, which in turn is part of the Wealden Supergroup. This Supergroup also houses the Weald Clay Group and Hastings Beds Group, which, along with the Wessex Formation, were home to some of the first dinosaurs discovered, such as Baryonyx and Iguanodon. During the early Cretaceous, the Wessex Formation, and Wealden Supergroup in general, was part of a large island in the Tethys, where Britain now is. It had a dry, fairly arid climate, with distinct wet and dry seasons, and where temperature differences between summer and winter were stark. Much of the Wessex lowlands during this period would have been mostly treeless, covered in shrubs and other low-lying plants. The uplands and floodplains on the other hand would have been much more verdant, at least for some parts of the year, and plausibly housed a greater diversity of species. Due to these differences in habitats, animals would probably have migrated across the island depending on the seasons, spending the fairly cool and wet winters in the lowlands, and the warm and dry summers in the uplands. In this post I will be covering several of the major groups present in this formation, from the smallest Crocodyliforms to the largest Sauropods.

Polacanthus at a creek, by John Sibbick

A brief guide to the Paleocene faunas of Europe

66 million years ago, the world was dominated by dinosaurs. Great herds of Hadrosaurs and Ceratopsians migrated across the continents, stalked by hosts of Tyrannosaurs, Dromeosaurs, and in some places Abelisaurs. Then one fateful day, the Chicxulub asteroid smashed into Earth, and in an instant, the age of Dinosaurs was over. When the dust settled, all Dinosaurian lineages except the Avians were extinct, and along with them were the Pterosaurs, Plesiosaurs, Mosasaurs, and a large chunk of pretty much everything else. This event, the K-PG extinction, marked the end of the Cretaceous, and the beginning of the first period in the Cenozoic. The large animals were gone, and the planet was essentially empty. This was the setting of the Paleocene, an odd and depauperate world, in many ways owing more to the Cretaceous than the periods that would follow.

The Chicxulub asteroid impact, marking the end of the Cretaceous