Access

News and Views

Nature 419, 440-441 (3 October 2002) | doi:10.1038/419440a

Open Innovation Challenges

naturejobs

Evolutionary biology: Death in the slow lane

Marcel Cardillo & Adrian Lister

Top

Were the Late Pleistocene extinctions of large mammals the result of climate change or big-game hunting by humans? Reconstructing the biology of extinct species provides clues to the answer.

What caused the Late Pleistocene 'megafaunal' extinctions — the episode between about 50,000 and 10,000 years ago when mammoths, giant ground sloths, giant kangaroos (Fig. 1) and dozens of other large vertebrate species became extinct?

  1. Marcel Cardillo is in the Department of Biological Sciences, Imperial College, Silwood Park, Ascot SL5 7PY, UK.
    e-mail: Email: m.cardillo@ic.ac.uk
  2. Adrian Lister is in the Department of Biology, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
    e-mail: Email: a.lister@ucl.ac.uk