Causes and consequences of late pleistocene extinctions

大约12，000年前，北美洲大约有70种哺乳动物物种灭绝，南美洲可能有80多种。其中大多数是大型动物，这在脊椎动物中是一个非常不寻常的趋势。这些损失的原因或原因已经争论了世纪，没有任何解决方案。这是由于大约11,000年前的快速变暖阶段，大型狩猎者进入北美，新的传染病甚至是外星人的影响吗？尽管这些损失可能是古老的，但它们与目前对全球范围内的损失的担忧有关。使用我们实验室开创的最先进的技术，在加拿大，我们计划仔细地从化石遗骸中提取受损的遗传物质，并重建更新世的关键物种，包括各种猛犸象是如何适应环境的，以及它们是如何随着环境而变化的（或者，或者，灭绝）。这项工作的性质是惊人的多学科;为此，我与各种科学家合作，包括古生物学家，地质学家，生物信息学家。我们的目标是在一个问题是经验性的，主要的探索工具是分子的背景下重新塑造更新世的争论。

Approximately 12,000 years ago, roughly 70 mammalian species in North America and perhaps more than 80 in South America went extinct. Most of these were large animals, a highly unusual trend in vertebrate extinctions. The cause or causes of these losses have been debated for more than a century, without any resolution. Was it due to a rapid warming phase around 11,000 years ago, the arrival of big game hunters into North America, novel infectious diseases or even an extraterrestrial impact? Although these losses may be ancient, they are relevant to existing concerns about worldwide extinctions. Using state-of-the-art techniques pioneered in our lab, here in Canada, we plan to carefully withdraw damaged genetic material from fossil remains and reconstruct how key Pleistocene species, including various species of mammoths were adapted to their environments, and how they changed (or, alternatively, became extinct) with their environments. This work by its nature is prodigiously multidisciplinary; to this end I am engaged in collaboration with a wide variety of scientists, including paleontologists, geologists, bioinformaticians. Our objective is to refashion the Pleistocene extinctions debate in a context, where the questions are empirical and the major tools of exploration are molecular.