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Notiomastodon Platensis
''Notiomastodon'' is an extinct genus of gomphothere proboscidean (related to modern elephants), endemic to South America from the Pleistocene to the early Holocene. ''Notiomastodon'' specimens reached a size similar to that of the modern Asian elephant, with a body mass of 3-4 tonnes. Like other brevirostrine gomphotheres such as ''Cuvieronius'' and ''Stegomastodon'', ''Notiomastodon'' had a shortened lower jaw and lacked lower tusks, unlike more primitive gomphotheres like ''Gomphotherium''. The genus was originally named in 1929, and has been controversial in the course of taxonomic history as it has frequently been confused with or synonymized with forms called ''Haplomastodon'' and ''Stegomastodon''. Extensive anatomical studies since the 2010s have shown that ''Notiomastodon'' represents the only valid proboscidean in lowland South America, ''Haplomastodon'' is synonymous and ''Stegomastodon'' is limited to North America, with the only other gomphothere in South America ''Cu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Early Pleistocene
The Early Pleistocene is an unofficial epoch (geology), sub-epoch in the international geologic timescale in chronostratigraphy, representing the earliest division of the Pleistocene Epoch within the ongoing Quaternary Period. It is currently estimated to span the time between 2.580 ± 0.005 annum, Ma (million years ago) and 0.773 ± 0.005 Ma. The term Early Pleistocene applies to both the Gelasian, Gelasian Age and the Calabrian (stage), Calabrian Age. While the Gelasian and the Calabrian have officially been defined by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) to effectively constitute the Early Pleistocene, the succeeding Chibanian and Tarantian ages have yet to be ratified. These proposed ages are unofficially termed the Middle Pleistocene and Late Pleistocene respectively. The Chibanian provisionally spans time from 773 ka to 126 ka, and the Tarantian from then until the definitive end of the whole Pleistocene, c. 9700 BC in the 10th millennium BC. Notes {{Ge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eremotherium
''Eremotherium'' (from Greek for "steppe" or "desert" "beast": ἔρημος "steppe or desert" and θηρίον "beast") is an extinct genus of giant ground sloth in the family Megatheriidae. ''Eremotherium'' lived in southern North America, Central America, and northern South America. It was one of the largest sloths, with a body size comparable to elephants, weighing around and measuring about long, slightly larger than its close relative ''Megatherium''. Originating during the Pliocene, ''Eremotherium'' migrated northwards into North America as part of the Great American Interchange of fauna between North and South America following the emergence of the Isthmus of Panama during the late Pliocene. Finds of ''Eremotherium'' are common and widespread, with fossils being found as far north as South Carolina (with a single record also reported from New Jersey) in the United States and as far south as Rio Grande Do Sul in southern Brazil, and many complete skeletons have been unea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gotthelf Fischer Von Waldheim
Gotthelf Fischer von Waldheim (; 13 October 1771 – 18 October 1853) was a Saxon anatomist, entomologist and paleontologist. Fischer was born as Gotthilf Fischer in Waldheim, Saxony, the son of a linen weaver. He studied medicine at Leipzig. He travelled to Vienna and Paris with his friend Alexander von Humboldt and studied under Georges Cuvier. He took up a professorship at Mainz, and then in 1804, became Professor of Natural History and Director of the Demidov Natural History Museum at the Moscow University. In August 1805, he founded the Société Impériale des Naturalistes de Moscou. Fischer was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1812 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1818. Fischer was mainly engaged in the classification of invertebrates, the result of which was his ''Entomographia Imperii Rossici'' (1820–1851). He also spent time studying fossils from the area around Moscow. Due to his work stud ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Concepción, Chile
Concepción (; originally: ''Concepción de la Madre Santísima de la Luz'', "Conception of the Blessed Mother of Light") is a city and Communes of Chile, commune in south-central Chile, and the geographical and demographic core of the Greater Concepción metropolitan area, it is the second largest city in Chile by urban area and one of the three major conurbations in the country. It has a significant impact on domestic trade being part of the most heavily industrialized region in the country. It is the seat of the Concepción Province, Chile, Concepción Province and the capital of the Biobío Region. It sits about 500 km south of the nation's capital, Santiago. The city was first settled in the Bay of Concepción, in the zone that would later become the commune of Penco, now part of the Greater Concepción, Concepción conurbation. The city's demonym, , comes from the place of its original foundation. The city center and historic district is located in the Valle de la Mocha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Imbabura Volcano
Imbabura is an inactive stratovolcano in northern Ecuador. Although it has not erupted for about 7,500 years, it is not thought to be extinct. Imbabura is intermittently capped with snow and has no permanent glaciers. Covered in volcanic ash, the slopes of Imbabura are especially fertile. In addition to cloud forests, which are found across the northern Andes to an altitude of 3000 m, the land around Imbabura is extensively farmed. Maize, sugarcane, and beans are all staple crops of the region. Cattle are also an important commodity, and much of the land on and around Imbabura, especially the high-altitude meadows above the tree line, is used for grazing. Geography and geology Imbabura is a volcano in the southern Ring of Fire. As the Nazca Plate is subducted beneath the South American Plate, the former melts with exposure to the hotter asthenosphere. This melted rock, which is less dense than the crust above it, rises to the surface. The result is an arc of volcan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Georges Cuvier
Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, baron Cuvier (23 August 1769 – 13 May 1832), known as Georges Cuvier (; ), was a French natural history, naturalist and zoology, zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology through his work in comparing living animals with fossils. Cuvier's work is considered the foundation of vertebrate paleontology, and he expanded Linnaean taxonomy by grouping classes into phylum, phyla and incorporating both fossils and living species into the classification. Cuvier is also known for establishing extinction as a fact—at the time, extinction was considered by many of Cuvier's contemporaries to be merely controversial speculation. In his ''Essay on the Theory of the Earth'' (1813) Cuvier proposed that now-extinct species had been wiped out by periodic catastr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alexander Von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 1769 – 6 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, natural history, naturalist, List of explorers, explorer, and proponent of Romanticism, Romantic philosophy and Romanticism in science, science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguistics, linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botany, botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern Earth's magnetic field, geomagnetic and meteorology, meteorological monitoring. Humboldt and Carl Ritter are both regarded as the founders of modern geography as they established it as an independent scientific discipline. Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in the Americas, exploring and describing them for the first time from a non-Spanish European scientific point of view. His des ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gomphothere Teeth South America Cuvier 1806
Gomphotheres are an extinct group of proboscideans related to modern elephants. First appearing in Africa during the Oligocene, they dispersed into Eurasia and North America during the Miocene and arrived in South America during the Pleistocene as part of the Great American Interchange. Gomphotheres are a paraphyletic group ancestral to Elephantidae, which contains modern elephants, as well as Stegodontidae. While most famous forms such as ''Gomphotherium'' had long lower jaws with tusks, the ancestral condition for the group, some later members developed shortened (brevirostrine) lower jaws with either vestigial or no lower tusks and outlasted the long-jawed gomphotheres. This change made them look very similar to modern elephants, an example of parallel evolution. During the Pliocene and Early Pleistocene, the diversity of gomphotheres declined, ultimately becoming extinct outside of the Americas. The last two genera, '' Cuvieronius'' ranging southern North America to wester ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paleo-Indians
Paleo-Indians were the first peoples who entered and subsequently inhabited the Americas towards the end of the Late Pleistocene period. The prefix ''paleo-'' comes from . The term ''Paleo-Indians'' applies specifically to the lithic period in the Western Hemisphere and is distinct from the term ''Paleolithic''.''Paleolithic'' specifically refers to the period between million years ago and the end of the Pleistocene in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is not used in New World archaeology. Traditional theories suggest that big-animal hunters crossed the Bering Strait from North Asia into the Americas over a land bridge ( Beringia). This bridge existed from 45,000 to 12,000 BCE (47,000–14,000 BP). Small isolated groups of hunter-gatherers migrated alongside herds of large herbivores far into Alaska. From BCE ( BP), ice-free corridors developed along the Pacific coast and valleys of North America. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Megafauna
In zoology, megafauna (from Ancient Greek, Greek μέγας ''megas'' "large" and Neo-Latin ''fauna'' "animal life") are large animals. The precise definition of the term varies widely, though a common threshold is approximately , this lower end being centered on humans, with other thresholds being more relative to the sizes of animals in an ecosystem, the spectrum of lower-end thresholds ranging from to . Large body size is generally associated with other traits, such as having a slow rate of reproduction and, in large herbivores, reduced or negligible adult mortality from being killed by predators. Megafauna species have considerable effects on their local environment, including the suppression of the growth of woody vegetation and a consequent reduction in wildfire frequency. Megafauna also play a role in regulating and stabilizing the abundance of smaller animals. During the Pleistocene, megafauna were diverse across the globe, with most continental ecosystems exhibiting s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Late Pleistocene Extinctions
The Late Pleistocene to the beginning of the Holocene saw the extinction of the majority of the world's megafauna, typically defined as animal species having body masses over , which resulted in a collapse in faunal density and diversity across the globe. The extinctions during the Late Pleistocene are differentiated from previous extinctions by their extreme size bias towards large animals (with small animals being largely unaffected), and widespread absence of ecological succession to replace these extinct megafaunal species, and the regime shift of previously established faunal relationships and habitats as a consequence. The timing and severity of the extinctions varied by region and are generally thought to have been driven by humans, climatic change, or a combination of both. Human impact on megafauna populations is thought to have been driven by hunting ("overkill"), as well as possibly environmental alteration. The relative importance of human vs climatic factors in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Musth
Musth or must (from Persian, ) is a periodic condition in bull (male) elephants characterized by aggressive behavior in animals, aggressive behavior and accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones. It has been known in Asian elephants for 3 000 years but was only described in African elephants in 1981. Evidence indicates that similar behaviour occurred in extinct proboscideans like gomphotheres and mastodons. Elephants often discharge a thick, tar-like secretion called temporin from the temporal gland during musth. Behavioral management for captive bull elephants in musth includes physical restraint and a starvation diet for several days to a week. Etymology Musth comes from an Urdu term for intoxication; in Persian it means .''The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus: American edition'', published 1996 by Oxford University Press; p. 984 Biology Musth has been known in Asian elephants for 3000 years (described in the Rigveda 1500–1000 B.C.) but was recognized in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
