In Northern Eurasia and Beringia (including Siberia and Alaska), 9 genera (35%) of megafauna (Table 3) went extinct in two pulses (Koch and Barnosky, 2006:219). Warm weather adapted megafauna such as straight-tusked elephants, hippos, hemionid horses, and short-faced bears went extinct between 48,000 and 23,000 cal BP and cold-adapted

megafauna such as mammoths went extinct between 14,000 and 11,500 cal BP. In central North America, approximately 34 genera (72%) of large mammals went extinct between about 13,000 and 10,500 years ago, including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, horses, tapirs, camels, bears, saber-tooth cats, and a variety of Apoptosis inhibitor other animals (Alroy, 1999, Grayson, 1991 and Grayson, 2007). Selleckchem NLG919 Large mammals were most heavily affected, but some small mammals, including a skunk and rabbit, also went extinct. South America lost an even larger number and percentage, with 50 megafauna genera (83%) becoming extinct at about the same time. In Australia, some 21 genera (83%) of large marsupials, birds, and reptiles went extinct (Flannery and

Roberts, 1999) approximately 46,000 years ago, including giant kangaroos, wombats, and snakes (Roberts et al., 2001). In the Americas, Eurasia, and Australia, the larger bodied animals with slow reproductive rates were especially prone to extinction (Burney and Flannery, 2005 and Lyons et al., 2004), a pattern that seems to be unique to late Pleistocene extinctions.

According to statistical analyses by Alroy (1999), this late Quaternary extinction episode is more selective for large-bodied animals than any other extinction interval in the last 65 million years. Current evidence suggests that the initial human Phosphoprotein phosphatase colonization of Australia and the Americas at about 50,000 and 15,000 years ago, respectively, and the appearance of AMH in Northern Eurasia beginning about 50,000 years ago coincided with the extinction of these animals, although the influence of humans is still debated (e.g., Brook and Bowman, 2002, Brook and Bowman, 2004, Grayson, 2001, Roberts et al., 2001, Surovell et al., 2005 and Wroe et al., 2004). Many scholars have implicated climate change as the prime mover in megafaunal extinctions (see Wroe et al., 2006). There are a number of variations on the climate change theme, but the most popular implicates rapid changes in climate and vegetation communities as the prime driver of extinctions (Grayson, 2007, Guthrie, 1984 and Owen-Smith, 1988). Extinctions, then, are seen as the result of habitat loss (King and Saunders, 1984), reduced carrying capacity for herbivores (Guthrie, 1984), increased patchiness and resource fragmentation (MacArthur and Pianka, 1966), or disruptions in the co-evolutionary balance between plants, herbivores, and carnivores (Graham and Lundelius, 1984).