Table Of ContentTHE CAL L OF
DISTANT
MAMMOTHS
PETER D. WARD
THE CALL OF
DISTANT
MAMMOTHS
Why the Ice Age
Mammals Disappeared
c
SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC
© 1997 Peter D. Ward
Originally published by Copernicus in 1997
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
First softcover printing 1998.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ward, Peter Douglas, 1949-
The call of distant mammoths : why the ice age mammals disappeared / Peter
Douglas Ward,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-387-98572-5 ISBN 978-1-4612-1946-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4612-1946-0
1. Mastodon. 2. Extinction (Biology) I. Title.
QE882.P8W37 1997
569'.67—DC21 96-48690
Printed on acid-free paper.
Designed by Irmgard Lochner.
Cover illustration by Alexis Rockman.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-0-387-98572-5 SPIN 10682969
For Chris, Nicholas, and the new one.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank many people who helped in the writing and
production of this book. Three stand out: Jerry Lyons and Bill Frucht,
who showed me what really good editors can and should do; and Don
Grayson, scientist and scholar. Grayson has defined the debate about
overkill and given it meaning and substance. I would also like to thank
the excellent production staff at Springer~Verlag, especially Vicky
Evarretta.
I apologize for the errors which probably will be found and hope that
the imperfections of the writer are no greater than those of the fos~
sil record.
Peter D. Ward
Department of Geological Sciences
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
vii
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Prologue: The Elephants' Graveyard xi
1 The Time Machine 1
2 Heart of Darkness 24
3 When Worlds Collide 48
4 The Once and Future Kingdoms 68
5 Wheel of Fortune 88
6 The Hunger 118
7 The Kill Curve 166
8 The Lost World 192
9 Nevermore 202
10 The Smoking Gun 215
Afterword: 3001 221
References 225
Index 231
ix
rl'·
J
27.8
28.oe
"
SKULL OF SABER-TOOTHED TIGER, TOOTH OF MAMMOTH AND HORSE:
ALL ICE-AGE uMEGAMAMMALS."
Prologue:
The
Elephants'
Graveyard
T
HERE IS A TALE TOLD to our children about a place deep in the jungle,
where elephants go when they are ready to die. This place is called the Ele
phant's Graveyard, and the story makes death seem dignified and peaceful.
A gentle fairy tale, but is there a grain of truth involved?
Elephant graveyards do exist. However, the real ones are not roman
tic, nor are the deaths occurring there in any way gentle. Some of these
graveyards are in the African and Asian jungles, or in the East and South
African dry lands where the last elephants live wild today, and where ele
phants do die, sometimes in large numbers, due to drought, starvation, or
human poaching and predation.
xi
xii THE CALL OF DISTANT MAMMOTHS
Yet, these killing fields in Africa and Asia are not the only elephant
graveyards. Another kind exists in the geological record-the ancient rocky
strata of past ages filled with fossils. These fossil elephant graveyards have
been found the world over, telling us that once, not so long ago, every con
tinent save Australia and Antarctica was the home of great elephants, and
teaching us, as well, stark lessons about extinction.
Finally, there is a third sort of elephant's graveyard, found not in Na
ture present or past, but in the many Natural History Museums gracing this
planet, such as the Burke Museum in Seattle where I work. The dead ele
phants are brought for study and for safety to these museums. These elephant
graveyards are perhaps closest in spirit to the children's tale, for here the bones
of both the newly and long-dead elephants are indeed cared for and revered.
I have visited such an Elephant's Graveyard each day, to be necessarily sur
rounded by the bones of great elephants from the deep past. It has always
been moving, but some days have been far more poignant than others.
My steps echoed hugely as I descended into the stark stairwell, and
not for the first time I reflected that a carpet would do wonders here. But
this is not a flagship museum, neither Smithsonian nor American Museum
of Natural History; it is a typical University Museum, operating on a star
vation budget, run by part-time Academic Curators and volunteer labor.
The ambiance is less than charming, if nevertheless familiar and utilitarian:
here and there one can see a scurrying dermestid beetle (a verminous es
capee from the Zoology Department's efforts to strip flesh from bones), while
the air yields equal parts of ancient fossil dust and formaldehyde. I reached
my floor, deep in the windowless basement of the building, and passed
through the featureless halls with fluorescent tubes overhead. I saw our Cu
rator of Paleobotany, in a nearby room, moving rock-filled boxes, and far
ther down the hall our usually nocturnal Curator of Arachnids sat in his
arthropodan lair, surrounded by thousands of spiders, alive and dead. My
own mission this day was somewhat different from my normal routine, for
I had just received a large fossil tooth, a piece of beach wrack coming from
Prologue: The Elephants' Graveyard xiii
the towering gravel cliffs near the Olympic Mountains of Washington State.
It is a relict of the dead, exhumed from its 11,000 year-old grave site by the
wind and waves of Puget Sound, and found by an aging beach comber. It
has now come to me, and it is my duty to bury such fossils once again, to
give them a new resting place, this time not in stony soil but in a tall, gray
sarcophagus built by the Lane Scientific Company. Instead of a headstone,
these rocks from the Ice Age are given a number, and some vague sort of
immortality as electronic life on a large database. It had come to me as so
many of these lithic fragments do, not from an organized paleontological
dig but from another phone call.
Arriving in my cavernous room, I switched on the lights overhead, re
vealing the great boneyard around me. This particular room is the final rest
ing place for all of the great skeletons discovered over the decades by both
amateur and professional paleontologists of Washington State. The harsh
light etches vertebrae and ribs, leering skulls and horns from the near and
distant past. But the most striking and spectacular objects in the room are
the great ivory tusks-curving, giant elephant-like tusks, far larger than any
elephant tusk of today and in unlike shapes-for this room is filled with the
remains of mammoths and mastodons from the Ice Age. It is to this grave
yard that I have brought a new piece of the old. Starting the slow process
of curation, I replayed in my mind the events just transpired two floors
above.
The telephone call had come the previous day. Being one of the few
paleontologists in a state exacts its own unique price to pay, for to the un
numbered children in my state, every round rock is a hopeful dinosaur egg,
every old decaying cow bone the humerus of an Allosaurus, every stony shell
the promise of an ancient world; yet sometimes, just sometimes, these ex
travagant promises tum out to be correct. Thus, I never refuse the phone
calls about some newly dreamed dragon, for the rare dragon bones do exist,
to be disinterred each spring by the steady Northwest rain.
So I had answered the phone, to receive a most unusual request. A
woman caller hoped that I could see her father. He was terminally ill with
cancer and in his eighties. Furthermore, could I see him ... soon. I asked
