Download Once and Future Giants: What Ice Age Extinctions Tell Us About the Fate of Earth's Largest Animals AudioBook Free
Until about 13,000 years back, North America was home to a menagerie of large mammals. Mammoths, camels, and lions walked the ground that has become Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles and foraged on the marsh land now buried beneath Chicago's avenues. Then, equally as the first humans come to the Americas, these Ice Get older giants vanished permanently. In Once and Future Giants, technology copy writer Sharon Levy digs through the data bordering Pleistocene large creature ("megafauna") extinction happenings worldwide, demonstrating that understanding this background - and our part in it - is essential for protecting the elephants, polar bears, and other great animals vulnerable today. These surviving relatives of the Ice Get older beasts now face an intensified replay of this great die-off, as our species usurps the planet's previous outrageous places while generating a warming pattern more extreme than any in mammalian background. Inspired by way of a interest for the lost Pleistocene giants, some researchers advocate delivering elephants and cheetahs to the Great Plains as stand-ins for his or her extinct native brethren. By reintroducing big web browsers and carnivores to North America, they argue, we could rescue a few of the planet's most endangered pets while restoring healthy prairie ecosystems. Critics, including biologists enmeshed in the battle to restore native species like the gray wolf and the bison, see the proposal as an unhealthy distraction from more sensible and authentic conservation work. Deftly navigating fighting theories and emerging research, Once and Future Giants examines the degree of human effect on megafauna extinctions, recent and present, and explores ground breaking conservation efforts around the world. The main element to modern-day conservation, Levy advises, may lay fossilized right under our toes.
