![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Showing 1 - 7 of 7 matches in All Departments
Fieldiana Anthropology: A Continuation Of The Anthropological Series Of Field Museum Of Natural History, V41.
Fieldiana Anthropology: A Continuation Of The Anthropological Series Of Field Museum Of Natural History, V41.
Hidden high in the Sierra de Guatemala mountain range of northeastern Mexico in the state of Tamaulipas is the northernmost tropical cloud forest of the Western Hemisphere. Within its humid oak-sweetgum woodlands, tropical and temperate species of plants and animals mingle in rare diversity, creating a mecca for birders and other naturalists. Fred and Marie Webster first visited Rancho del Cielo, cloud forest home of Canadian immigrant Frank Harrison, in 1964, drawn by the opportunity to see such exotic birds as tinamous, trogons, motmots, and woodcreepers only 500 miles from their Austin, Texas, home. In this book, they recount their many adventures as researchers and tour leaders from their base at Rancho del Cielo, interweaving their reminiscences with a history of the region and of the struggle by friends from both sides of the border to have some 360,000 acres of the mountain declared an area protected from exploitation--El Cielo Biosphere Reserve. Their firsthand reporting, enlivened with vivid tales of the people, land, and birds of El Cielo, adds an engagingly personal chapter to the story of conservation in Mexico.
As recently as 11,000 years ago--"near time" to
geologists--mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, ground sloths, giant
armadillos, native camels and horses, the dire wolf, and many other
large mammals roamed North America. In what has become one of
science's greatest riddles, these large animals vanished in North
and South America around the time humans arrived at the end of the
last great ice age. Part paleontological adventure and part memoir,
"Twilight of the Mammoths "presents in detail internationally
renowned paleoecologist Paul Martin's widely discussed and debated
"overkill" hypothesis to explain these mysterious megafauna
extinctions. Taking us from Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon, where
he finds himself "chest deep in sloth dung," to other important
fossil sites in Arizona and Chile, Martin's engaging book, written
for a wide audience, uncovers our rich evolutionary legacy and
shows why he has come to believe that the earliest Americans
literally hunted these animals to death.
Over the past thirty years, late Quaternary environments in the arid interior of western North America have been revealed by a unique source of fossils: well-preserved fragments of plants and animals accumulated locally by packrats and quite often encased, amberlike, in large masses of crystallized urine. These packrat middens are ubiquitous in caves and rock crevices throughout the arid West, where they can lie preserved for tens of thousands of years. More than a thousand of these deposits have been dated and analyzed, and middens have supplanted pollen records as a touchstone for studying vegetation dynamics and climatic change in radiocarbon time (the last 40,000 years). Now, similar deposits made by other mammals like hyraxes are being reported from other parts of the world. This book brings together the most recent findings and views of many of the researchers now investigating fossil middens in the United States, Mexico, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia. The contributions serve to open a forum for methodological concerns, update the fossil record of various geographic regions, introduce new applications, and display the vast potential for fossil midden analysis in arid regions worldwide. The findings presented here will serve to foster regional research and to promote general studies devoted to global climate change. Included in the text are more than two hundred charts, photographs, and maps.
"What caused the extinction of so many animals at or near the end
of the Pleistocene? Was it overkill by human hunters, the result of
a major climatic change or was it just a part of some massive
evolutionary turnover? Questions such as these have plagued
scientists for over one hundred years and are still being heatedly
debated today. "Quaternary Extinctions" presents the latest and
most comprehensive examination of these questions." --Geological
Magazine
|
![]() ![]() You may like...
Beauty And The Beast - Blu-Ray + DVD
Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, …
Blu-ray disc
R326
Discovery Miles 3 260
|