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.

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

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

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