There Was the Gratuitous Lie about the Current Mass Extinction.
Guest post by David Middleton
America’s pronghorns are survivors of a mass extinction
At the end of the last Ice Age, most large animals in North America were wiped out, and others transformed themselves. Yet one has survived virtually unchanged to the present day
Where cars now drive along congested roads in the heart of modern Los Angeles, sabre-toothed cats once roamed. They stalked prey that ranged from hoofed mammals to creatures resembling elephants. The ferocious cats competed with dire wolves, American lions and short-faced bears.
During the Pleistocene, the geological period that began just over 2.5 million years ago, North America experienced a series of ice ages. During these freezes and thaws, giant mammals thrived in the woodlands and savannahs of Southern California. Primitive cheetahs chased antelope-like pronghorns over miles of grasslands, while mastodons roamed in dense herds.
But suddenly, around 11,000 years ago, almost all of these species died. Mammoths, giant sloths and camels all disappeared completely from the Americas. Only one large plant-eater remained, nearly unchanged since it first began racing through the south-west 30,000 years ago: the pronghorn.
Nobody is really sure what caused the extinction event. It has variously been blamed on fluctuating temperatures and climates, the encroachment of man, invasive plants or new bacteria, or all of the above.
But perhaps the bigger question is, why did some species survive while so many died out? In particular, why was the pronghorn able to outlast almost every Ice Age herbivore and persist into the present day – with pretty much the same build and look as it did in prehistory, to boot?
It is not just an academic question. Figuring out how the pronghorn survived the mass extinction could help us understand the mass extinction that is now underway, and offer tips on how to rescue today’s threatened species.
[…]
The rest of the article is very interesting, particularly to Pleistocene aficionados… But the gratuitous lie about “the mass extinction that is now underway” was too much to ignore.
Willis Eschenbach thoroughly demolished this lie in this WUWT post and in this paper he coauthored with Craig Loehle.
Mass extinctions in the fossil record are characterized by the terminations of entire genera, families, orders, classes and occasionally even subphyla… Not just species.
Elrathia kingii bought the farm during the Late Cambrian. It is an extinct Trilobite species.
Trilobites are an extinct class of an extinct subphylum (Trilobitomorpha) of an extant phylum (Arthropoda). The entire Trilobite class along with all of its then extant orders, families, genera and species bought the farm in the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.
Real mass extinctions take out entire classes, orders and families of animals.
How many classes, orders or families have been killed off in the current faux mass extinction? I’m going to take a scientific wild ass guess (SWAG) and say:
There is currently only one critically endangered genus and it belongs to the same order as the mass extinction surviving pronghorn.
Entire Mammal Genus on Brink of Extinction
Critically endangered African antelope is last species of its kind.
By Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic News
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 8, 2011
For the first time in 75 years, an entire genus of mammal may go the way of the dodo—unless a new conservation effort shepherded by Somalian herders succeeds.
The hirola, a large African antelope known for its striking, goggle-like eye markings, is the only remaining species in the genus Beatragus—and its numbers are dwindling fast, conservationists say.
The last mammal genus to blink out was Thylacinus, in 1936, with the death of the last Tasmanian tiger. A genus is a taxonomic ranking between species and family.
[…]
The hirola and the pronghorn are both antelopes.
At one genus per 75 years, the faux “mass extinction” will take quite a long time, particularly if it turns out that Thylacinus is less extinct than previously thought.
Addendum
[1] The pronghorn did not survive a mass extinction. While the Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene extinction event was significant; it does not rate as one of Earth’s five known mass extinctions.
[2] From a purely taxonomic perspective, pronghorn aren’t antelope. From a common usage perspective, they are known as American antelope or just antelope.
Home on the Range
Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,
And the skies are not cloudy all day.
Chorus Home, home on the range,
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,
And the skies are not cloudy all day.
Read more: https://www.scoutsongs.com/lyrics/home-on-the-range.html#ixzz4dOntguZ4
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Bird flu. China first
https://youtu.be/Fn_1d_DUE08