EVENTS CALENDAR
Join us for the fall Distinguished Lecturer Series event, "Mastodons and Mammoths of the Great Lakes Region: Tales Tusks Tell," with lecturer Daniel Fisher. Fisher teaches at the University of Michigan, where he is the Claude W. Hibbard Collegiate Professor of Paleontology, director of the Museum of Paleontology, and professor in the Departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Event Abstract: Mastodons and mammoths, relatives of elephants, were prominent members of IceAge faunas of the Great Lakes region, and both disappeared from this area about10,000 years ago. What caused their extinction remains a mystery. A new approach to this problem uses their tusks as monitors of diet, growth rates, environmental quality, and reproductive biology. Tusk layers also form on a hierarchy of time intervals from daily to weekly to annual, and counts of these layers provide data on age. The key to inferring cause of extinction is a better understanding of conditions of life. Only a quantitative analysis of tusk records accesses the data critical to understanding what drove the extinction of mastodons and mammoths and humans’ role in this process.
Tickets are not required for this event