Sunday, January 27, 2013

Questions About "Factors Influencing the Physical Environment"

As an experiment designed to foster interaction among the class I have created a Blog post in which you can ask any questions or make any comments you have about the factors that influence the physical environment.  I anyone has questions then I will try to answer them on the blog so that everyone can learn from the answer.  If you have topics that you think might be fun to discuss then please add them and hopefully we can generate some "lively discussion" this semester.
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3 comments:

  1. CharityGEJanuary 27, 2013 at 9:05 PM

    I took my students before to the Lubbock Lake Landmark. There's this huge full-scale statue of a mammoth and I've always wondered if the reason those mammoths were instinct is because of the changing climate we had in the South Plains millions of years before or is it just one of those factor that these mammoths were hunted to extinction?

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  2. Mark McGinleyJanuary 28, 2013 at 10:57 AM

    Hi Charity, Thanks for posing a question on the blog.

    During the late Pleistocene,40,000 to 10,000 years ago, North America lost over 50 percent of its large mammal species, including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, among many others. In total,35 different genera(groups of species)disappeared, all of different habitat preferences and feeding habits.

    There are a number of hypotheses to explain this extinction–Overhunting by humans, removal of keystone species(e.g.,mammoth and mastadons), altered enviornment, virus introduced by humans killed mammals, climate change, and comet impact or airburst.

    Here are links to some references that relate to this topic-

    •EndoftheBigBeasts- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/end-bigbeasts.html

    •Mass Extinction:Why Did Half of N.America's Large Mammals Disappear 40,000 to 10,000 Years Ago?http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091127140706.htm

    •Deciphering North American Pleistocene Extinctions
    http://www.anthro.utah.edu/PDFs/grayson--jar07.pdf

    This is a very good topic to reexamine at the end of the semester when we are discussing macroevolution.

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  3. Gordon WilliamsonFebruary 12, 2013 at 4:36 PM

    The link above did not work. Try this:
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/end-big-beasts.html

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