The first million years
After the dinosaurs were wiped out:
Reporting today in the journal Science, Miller’s team, led by vertebrate paleontologist Tyler Lyson, has uncovered an enormous cache of fossils from Colorado’s Denver Basin that include the first million years that followed the asteroid’s arrival. The site’s thousands of plant and animal remains chart out an extraordinarily detailed timeline of ecosystem recovery, pinpointing the rise and fall of species at a resolution of hundreds of thousands of years—mere seconds on the geologic clock.
In the millennia following the impact, five-foot crocodiles and keg-sized turtles re-entered the waters to stretch their leathery legs. Plants unfurled their roots into the once-scorched soil, sprouting nutrient-rich beans and small, fast-growing leaves. No longer threatened by flesh-hungry dinosaurs, mammals—our own predecessors—ballooned to new sizes, lumbering across the floodplains on thick, stocky limbs.
Documenting these changes and more, the collection constitutes the most comprehensive catalog of K-Pg survivors to date. Its contents showcase the extraordinary resilience of life on Earth in the wake of disaster—and help reveal some of the first stones on the evolutionary path that eventually led to the primates known as humans.
The ones who did many interesting things but also did a lot of damage to that recovered ecosystem.
Even pre-industrial people supposedly living ‘in harmony’ with nature, such as Australia’s Aborigines, brought about enormous ecosystem changes, involving extermination of species. But Nature always bats last.
I cannot get the phrase “keg-sized turtles” out of my mind now.
It’s striking, isn’t it.
Mind you, we had a pair of Aldabra tortoises at the zoo. They were bigger than any stinkin’ keg.
We aren’t alone. Bloody beavers mess things up big time.
https://www.monbiot.com/2014/07/04/beaver-baiters/
What’s interesting and fun about nature is that today’s invasive species is tomorrow’s threatened native. The extinction of one is the open niche for another. And beavers, even if they re-invade where they once were native, reshape the landscape.
But in a good way, at least if one measures “good” by “more diverse and healthy ecosystems”. Humans often tend to dislike the reshaping that beavers do, but that’s invariably the result of human-supremacy-thinking. We humans are not the only residents (so our concerns/needs should not be the only ones under consideration), and the beneficial effects brought on by beavers are similar to the beneficial effects gained by reintroducing apex predators where they were once extirpated, e.g. wolves. I’ve seen this story repeated throughout the west, from Colorado through Wyoming, Idaho, and now in Washington, where grizzlies finally seem to be making a hesitant comeback. The people resisting this, of course, are the big cattle ranching operations with their multi-year leases on public land, who want the predators and the beavers wiped out: to destroy the commons for their own profit.
Yes, that’s true. And speaking of wolves, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana:
There’s basically open-season on them now. Cattle ranchers get compensated for the few head they lose, but they are allowed to kill them by whatever means they choose including running them down on ATVs. But now the ranchers are complaining about elk overgrazing, so they want an extension on the elk hunting season.
Which often mysteriously turn into high-dollar show calves the minute they are submitting their bill for compensation.
Down in Texas, they found a way to keep the wolves away from the cattle. It’s called electric fences. (I hate them; they are not good for wildlife movement.)
Re Michael Haubrich @6, here’s a Washington Post article with the details. The problem seems to be mainly in Montana, where the Republican governor (a hunter and trapper himself) and legislature have basically declared open season on wolves that stray outside of Yellowstone. And apparently they’re not content with waiting for the wolves to leave the park; they’re luring the wolves out with bait and trapping them when they leave.
The gov refers to this activity as “harvesting” wolves.
@What a Maroon, #6 – That’s not even sport. What do they “harvest” the wolves for? Not meat, not their fur, and I can’t even see how it validates their masculinity. Wrestling wolves, now there’s masculinity! In Wisconsin and Minnesota similar battles are coming to the fore over killing wolves. As it is, we have too many deer that are not getting culled by their natural predators. They’re getting killed by their secondary predators – cars on the highways, at considerable cost to the cars in both injuries to the drivers and total losses of the vehicles.
Yes, it’s just pure cruelty.
‘Harvesting’ of wildlife. Some advertising agency or PR company must have got some award or other for coming up with that euphemism. So wholesome.! So down home.! Redolent of happy, flaxen-haired lads and lasses bringing in the sheaves..