Essay On Quaternary Extinction

The Pleistocene faced massive evolutions and changes. The Bering land bridge helped large species such as the mammoth, bison, deer and all their relatives to cross over to the Americas. The ancestors of the human species made its big appearance, but most importantly there was the catastrophic extinction event of many species near the end of the Quaternary period. The event had a great effect on the species roaming on Earth. The Quaternary extinction event was caused by factors such as global climate fluctuations which pushed many to adaptation and others to extinction. It’s also plausible that hunters contributed to the Quaternary extinction by causing local extinctions. After the last ice age, the ecosystem was greatly impacted and a new diversity
Although smaller species such as the reindeer, bison and musk ox survived, larger species like the woolly rhinoceros, the woolly mammoth and the wild horse went extinct. The much larger cold-adapted species had a harder time to adapt to the temperature fluctuations (Voss). Larger organisms produce more heat in their bodies than smaller organisms do, thus the additional heat of the climate was of no help. Even if those large animals did adapt to the new climate, if there was already a decline in number for their population, it would be hard to recover from their loss due to their longer gestation periods compared to smaller animals (Dayton 1819). The increase in global temperatures demanded a great amount of adaptation from these beasts which caused extinctions if the adaptation wasn't done quick
The spread of humans especially impacted the wildlife in the areas such as the Americas and Australia, where animals had the least time co-evolving alongside with humans. The smoking gun of the Quaternary extinction lies within the vegetation. The Last Glacial Maximum cut out a lot of the protein-rich forbs and it wasn’t as abundant