Anthropologist contributes to major study of large animal extinction

Date:  September 20, 2019

Source:  University of Arkansas

As part of an international research group based at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, anthropology assistant professor Amelia Villaseñor contributed to a large, multi-institutional study explaining how the human-influenced mass extinction of giant carnivores and herbivores of North America fundamentally changed the biodiversity and landscape of the continent.

In their study published today in Science, researchers from Australia, the United States, Canada and Finland showed that humans shaped the processes underlying how species co-existed for the last several thousand years. Smaller, surviving animals such as deer changed their ecological interactions, the researchers found, causing ecological upheaval across the continent.

The researchers' work has implications for conservation of today's remaining large animals, now threatened by another human-led mass extinction.

The study's primary author is Anikó Tóth at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Tóth collaborated with Villaseñor and several other researchers at the Smithsonian's Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems Program, as well as researchers at other institutions.

Tóth and the co-authors focused on how large mammals were distributed across the continent in the Pleistocene and Holocene geological epochs. (The Pleistocene Epoch occurred from about 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago. Starting at the end of the Pleistocene, the Holocene is the current geological epoch.) To do this, the researchers analyzed how often pairs of species were found living in the same community or in different communities.

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