26th Annual Meeting and Symposium of the
Desert Tortoise Council, March 16-18, 2001
Abstracts

Recreating Evolution: Pleistocene Parks

Paul S. Martin
Emeritus Professor of Geosciences, Desert Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721

Those who yearn for recovery of wilderness dream of the restoration of large animals on the range. The problem is what kinds of large animals to restore. For two centuries the answer has seemed obvious - bring back bison and whatever other large mammals existed historically. But 13,000 years ago the North American megafauna (large mammals >45 kg in mass) suffered massive impoverishment. In evolutionary time North America would have supported upwards of 33 genera and 50 species as large or larger than a pronghorn, three times the number of large species known in ecological time. Prior to 13,000 years ago the most common fossils are proboscideans, equids, camelids, and bovids. For millions of years these groups evolved in North America. Whether human colonization forced the extinctions or whether the agent was climatic change, or both, nothing in the Cenozoic record matches the elimination of American mammals of large size at the end of the Pleistocene. In the face of a radical depletion in America's prehistoric megafauna a new approach to restoration ecology is needed. Native bovids, wild horses and asses, and domestic camelids are currently available for a Pleistocene park. Missing are the ultimate keystone species in late Cenozoic ecology, the elephants represented by mammoths, mastodonts, and gomphotheres. Also crucial in designing Pleistocene Parks are large carnivores, not excluding the African lion, a close relative of the extinct American lion. Parks stocked with surrogates for the lineages of the lost megafauna are essential both to demonstrate the evolutionary potential of this continent and to restart its evolution.

BOOKS edited by, with chapters by, or about Paul S. Martin

Barlow, Connie. 2001. The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruits, Missing Partners, and other Ecological Anachronisms. Basic Books: A Member of the Perseus Books Group. [A popular treatment of and revisions of Daniel H. Janzen and Paul S. Martin's 1982 article in Science: Neotropical anachronisms: the fruits the gomphotheres ate.]

Martin, P.S. 1999. Ecology of Sonoran Desert Plants and Plant Communities. Pages 255-290 in Robert H. Robichaux (ed.), Deep history and a wilder west. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 303 pp.

Martin, P.S. and D. W. Steadman. 1999. Extinctions in near time: Causes, contexts, and consequences. 1999. Pages 17-55 in R. D. E. MacPhee (ed.), Prehistoric extinctions on islands and continents. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York. 394 pp. [This book is the successor to P. S. Martin and R. G. Klein, 1984, 1989, Quaternary extinctions: a Prehistoric Revolution. University of Arizona Press, 892 pages (in print)].

Martin, Paul, David Yetman, Mark Fishbein, Phil Jenkins, Thomas R. Van Devender and Rebecca K. Wilson. 1998. Gentry's Rio Mayo Plants: The Tropical Deciduous Forest & Environs of Northwest Mexico. The Southwest Center Series, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 558 pages.

Betancourt, Julio L., Thomas R. Van Devender, and Paul S. Martin. 1990. Packrat Middens: The Last 40,000 Years of Biotic Change. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 467 pp.