The Contemplative Mammoth
papers
Contemplating an ice age squirrel’s forgotten snack
Earlier this week, scientists announced the successful propagation of a 32,000-year-old seed, discovered in a burrow made by an Siberian Arctic ground squirrel during the last ice age. The placental tissue of the Silene stenophylla seed was used to cultivate flowering, reproductively viable adults of narrow-leafed campion, which is still found in the Kolyma River … Continue reading
On Reading Old Things
As a young undergraduate, I remember researching my first term papers and take-home exams, flexing my new-found research skills to find the absolute best references. At first, I equated “best” with “newest.” This wasn’t necessarily a product of my training; my undergraduate advisor teaches ecology from Foundations of Ecology, which starts with Forbes’ 1887 paper … Continue reading
Climate AND humans? A new study using ancient DNA, fossils, & models contributes to a classic problem in paleoecology
The extinction of the ice-age megafauna is one of the most persistent (and contentious) problems in paleoecology. Since the 1960′s, the literature has been dominated by fierce debates about whether humans or climate change were responsible for the demise of the mammoths, mastodons, woolly rhinos, and other now-extinct megaherbivores and their predators. It’s difficult to … Continue reading
Early domesticated dogs may have shared mammoth meals
This is my first Paper of the Week post! One finding of the State of the Geoblogosphere paper that came out earlier this month (in addition to the fact that geobloggers being mostly white male academics, a topic for another day) is that geobloggers are seeking “rigorous analysis of scientific news and research.” I’m hoping to … Continue reading
Why I was not one of the 141 scientists who objected to Davis et al.’s invasives comment in Nature
Last month, Mark Davis and 18 ecologists argued in a Comment published in the journal Nature that the native-versus-alien dichotomy in conservation is not only increasingly impractical, but potentially counterproductive. The authors acknowledged that while some invasive species (e.g. zebra mussels) have widely-documented negative impacts, the application of the “invasive” label can also result in … Continue reading
