Do Ice Age Fossils receive enough interest?

[Rock Hound]

Mammoths and Smilodons stay in the public spotlight, but what about all of the other species?

[digit]

In the general public only a few Plio/Pleistocene species garner the most attention. Despite our population of retirees, Florida is a young state geologically and a large portion of our fossil riches is what would be called Ice Age. Our small boutique museum is packed with interesting species from giant sloths to huge armadillo-like animals, horses, bears, dire wolves and many smaller fauna.

 

Ask the average person to name 5 dinosaurs and most would likely struggle. Get them to name species that aren't featured in the Jurassic Park franchise and they may stumble to name any beyond the king of dinosaurian publicity--Tyrannosaurus rex.

 

In 2006 a species of red panda was discovered at the Gray site in Tennessee. It's just a few hundred thousand years older than our wildly rich Montbrook site here in Gainesville, FL. We've been joking for some time that the ultimate prize would be a red panda fossil from Montbrook. During our Fantastic Fossils outreach exhibit at our public display museum on campus last year, one of our paleontologists had a collection of plastic models of extinct mammals and one was of a red panda. I often heard the raised voices of younger kids shouting "A red panda!" and thought, "Wow! These kids are up on their Miocene/Pliocene mammals." I was later informed that there was a Disney/Pixar animated movie called Turning Red which featured a modern red panda in its story.

 

Some species simply hog all the glory. Either it is because they have an associated PR campaign related to some commercial product like a movie or they are huge and fearsome, T. rex, titanoboa, megalodon, etc. Generally, only a smaller subset of science nerds ever delve deeper into the fauna.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Bobby Rico]

Well interesting, the general public like the crowd pleasers (wild and woolly), Personally I do love the Pleistocene fauna’s weird and wonderful mammals. Were  lies some of my favourite creatures.

 

 

Edited June 30, 2023 by Bobby Rico

[JBkansas]

It's kinda sobering to think of all of the megafauna that disappeared when humans arrived. Guns, Germs and Steel makes the argument that one of the things that held the Americas back developmentally was the lack of domesticatable megafauna due to the humans crossing the Bering being expert hunters and much of the American fauna being quickly driven to extinction.

 

I never realized that horses first evolved here, were hunted to extinction, and then only showed back up with European settlement.

Edited June 29, 2023 by JBkansas

[Tidgy's Dad]

2 hours ago, digit said:

Get them to name species that aren't featured in the Jurassic Park franchise and they may stumble to name any beyond the king of dinosaurian publicity--Tyrannosaurus rex.

Hmm.

I believe that Tyrannosaurus rex is mentioned in the Jurassic Park franchise a couple of times. 

[digit]

2 hours ago, JBkansas said:

I never realized that horses first evolved here, were hunted to extinction, and then only showed back up with European settlement.

Yup. One of my favorite stories to tell folks. They made the trip around the world and floated the last leg back to North America on some really tiny wooden boats.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Rock Hound]

5 hours ago, JBkansas said:

It's kinda sobering to think of all of the megafauna that disappeared when humans arrived. Guns, Germs and Steel makes the argument that one of the things that held the Americas back developmentally was the lack of domesticatable megafauna due to the humans crossing the Bering being expert hunters and much of the American fauna being quickly driven to extinction.

 

I never realized that horses first evolved here, were hunted to extinction, and then only showed back up with European settlement.

It would have taken a ridiculous amount of carnage; considering the size of the land mass, and what must have been tremendous populations of many different species of animals.  That's an incredible number of animals, to be hunted into extinction.

[digit]

During the Pleistocene megafauna extinction 78 species that were larger than a ton vanished from North America. The current hypothesis is that climate change acceleration was likely the primary cause while paleo-hunters did their part to help. It's a contentious topic and much argued for decades.

 

 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21201-8

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

[Brandy Cole]

When explaining to my young nieces and nephew what type of fossils we have around here, I reference the Disney movie, "Ice Age." That's at least a reference point they can get.  Although limited, since the movie I think mostly just has mammoths, saber tooth cats, and rodents.  Better than nothing!

[FossilDAWG]

8 hours ago, Rock Hound said:

It would have taken a ridiculous amount of carnage; considering the size of the land mass, and what must have been tremendous populations of many different species of animals.  That's an incredible number of animals, to be hunted into extinction.

At first glance that would seem logical.  However you have to consider that large mammals reproduce slowly, producing one or two offspring at intervals of a few years.  Young individuals are attractive targets for hunters as they may be less dangerous and less adept at avoiding predation.  Under natural conditions each female must produce at least one female offspring during her lifetime for a population to be maintained at a steady state (males are less critical as one male can reproduce with multiple females, except in species where males and females form long term monogamous pairs).  Adding a new source of mortality to all the other hazards that confront young animals can push survival to reproductive age below the level needed to sustain the population.  You don't need to kill every individual to wipe out a species over time, you just need to kill a portion of the young.

 

That being said, killing an adult female can also have a disproportionate impact if she has nursing young, as they will certainly also die.

 

Another consideration is that some large mammals modify the environment in a way that sustains other species.  For example, elephants (and presumably mammoths and mastodon in the past) maintain open savanna/grassland habitats by pulling up or breaking down trees as they feed.  Loss of elephants results in open habitats converting to forest, which adversely affects other species that rely on those open habitats.  Because of these complex interactions a reduction in keystone species can result in a cascade of extinctions, as well as possibly increased opportunities for other species (such as forest dwelling species).

 

Hopefully this convinces people that it is not necessary to hunt every individual to cause extinction of a species, and loss of some keystone species can have environmental consequences leading to indirect impacts on additional species.

 

Don

[JBkansas]

1 hour ago, digit said:

During the Pleistocene megafauna extinction 78 species that were larger than a ton vanished from North America. The current hypothesis is that climate change acceleration was likely the primary cause while paleo-hunters did their part to help. It's a contentious topic and much argued for decades.

It reminds me of all the studies showing the dinosaurs were in decline (also due to climate) prior to the asteroid. Even with a cataclysmic asteroid strike, extinction is multifactoral.

[JBkansas]

8 hours ago, Rock Hound said:

It would have taken a ridiculous amount of carnage; considering the size of the land mass, and what must have been tremendous populations of many different species of animals.  That's an incredible number of animals, to be hunted into extinction.

Never forget that it humans took <100 years of hunting to drive the most populous bird in the world (3-5 billion birds at the peak) to extinction.

Edited June 30, 2023 by JBkansas

[Fossildude19]

To answer the OP's original question - Our Forum is full of posts about "ice age fossils". 

To me, that indicates they get their fair share of "interest." 

 

But human nature is fickle, and many people who collect tend to specialize their collections down to what is readily available to them.

Some people go for the popular fossils, Dinosaur, shark, trilobites, ammonites, crabs, large mammals.   Some specialize, some generalize.

Some people tend to gravitate towards the large and fierce, rather than the small, lesser known fossils.

 

Some people get fascinated by how things worked, together, in a biological/environmental way, and study everything about those interactions.

 

Are all fossils regarded by John Q public the same way? Not at all.  Flashy, large, and scary fossils will always outperform the meek, mild, and unobtrusive fossils.