Ice Age Extinctions Discussion | Randall Museum

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Mammoths, camels and saber-toothed cats once walked the ground that has become Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, and foraged on the marsh land now buried beneath Chicago’s streets. Then, just as the first humans reached the Americas, these Ice Age giants vanished forever. New research on the demise of ancient megafauna offers vital insights for modern conservation.

Sharon Levy is a biologist and veteran science journalist who covers conservation and biology for BioScience, Audubon, Nature, and other magazines. She is the author of the new Oxford University Press book, Once and Future Giants: what Ice Age extinctions tell us about the fate of Earth’s largest animals. Her talk will explore the relationships between people and big wild animals, past and present. Once and Future Giants focuses on the extinction of mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats and other Ice Age megafauna, the evidence that prehistoric people may have played a role in their demise, and related lessons for modern conservation. The book also critically explores Pleistocene rewilding, the notion that by bringing living counterparts of extinct beasts to their former ranges, we may be able to restore damaged habitats, and recast the ancient relationship between people and large wild animals. Levy delves into real-world examples of rewilding that have been both disastrous (mustangs in the western U.S.) and beneficial (the dingo in Australia).

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