Very true. That’s why early man moved to the tropical and equatorial regions, to maintain the balance of the weight on the earth. When the earth heats up, there is less ice at the poles so we can move further North. When the earth gets colder, man moves closer to the equator to counter-balance the weight of the ice at the poles. Hence no sudden shift of the earth in recorded history.
It all makes sense when you think of it logically!
The earth is flat. If you want proof, just look out the window.
Dr. F, that’s fascinating! I never knew that. Do you know of any articles/books on the subject? I recently heard that there used to be lions in parts of Europe too. Does anyone know where I could find information on this?
J’ai assez vécu pour voir que différence engendre haine.
Henri B. Stendhal
When I was living in Italy I went to a museum exposition on prehistory, and I actually saw a Russian baby mammooth preserved in a casing of ice. I was quite young and I had trouble making out the details of the mammooth, but what an exciting moment it was.
Abe
“For what is myth, but the deconstructive prose of a missing literary critic who lisps?”
–Harry Harrison
Most likely it was in Mammal Evolution: An Illustrated Guide by R.J.G. Savage and someone else (sorry, I’m at work and those books are at home). I like this book, it has lots of pretty pictures, although it is at least 15 years out of date now.
Next, when I have the free time to play, I am going to look up a paper by Jared Diamond that asks the musical question “Did the Komodo Monitor Eat Pygmie Elephants?” It seems that the Komodo dragon now hunts goats and deer. But goats and deer are recently introduced fauna in those islands. This raises the question of what these big lizards were born to eat. I don’t know if Diamond has a real answer (supported by, say, tiny elephant bones with teeth marks) or just an interesting speculation. It should be fun to find out either way.
Dr. Fidelius, Charlatan
Associate Curator Anomalous Paleontology, Miskatonic University
“You cannot reason a man out of a position he did not reach through reason.”
As for the Wrangell Id mini-mammoths, the way I understood it is: They existed in historical times in the sense that history was being recorded elsewhere. But those were not historical times there. That would be the same as saying that the Mound Builders were still living in America in historic times because the Chinese were writing history back then. But in America that is considered prehistoric times. (Sorry, I should’ve come up with a better example, as some mounds continued to be built by modern Indians.) In fact nobody (white) knew the junior mammoths existed until after they had all died out. So it seems a stretch to claim that we killed them. Unless you’re an Innuit. (I forget whether the “Eskimos” killed them off but I think they simply died out.) Did I state this all confusingly enough?
So nobody “white” knew the Wrangle Island mammoths existed. So what?
[rant]
By “we” I mean people. Homo sap. And it matters not to me what clan, tribe, nation, or group killed a species, “we” did it. Do you have any idea how many endemic species have been exteminated on island by “us”? Even before the Europeans started exploiting the entire globe, half of Hawaii’s endemic birds were eradicated, and all the moas (and the giant eagles that fed upon the moas) in New Zealand. These happened in HISTORICAL TIMES, or, if you are not able to comprehend that this expression does not mean that a person dwelling in that area was capable of writing down her observations I could just say “within the past four thousand years.” BUT, I feel that referring to the time period as “historical times” brings the point home more clearly that YOU, ME, AND OUR CHILDREN MISSED these creaures by a very small margin. That is why I am involved with conservation efforts, because I do not want my descendants to miss manatees, elephants, Madagascar cloud-rats, any type of Ozark salamander, or any of the other irreplacable living things which we still have left.
I would support an effort to revive the mammoth. From what I understand, the genetic differences between them and Indian elephants were minor enough to give us hope that a mammoth could be fostered by an elephant surrogate. It would be beyond cool to have the hairy elephants back on the tundra.
Now, do you think it is easier to preserve an existing population, or to try to re-create one from a limited stock of genotypes stored somewhere? Human culpability in a species’ decline need not be a factor in the (hypothetical) question of whether the species should be revived.
I don’t know about Wrangell Island, but dwarf mammoth fossils have been found here in California on the Channel Islands. These islands were once connected to the mainland during the Ice Age when the sea level was much lower because most of the world’s water was frozen and on dry land. The mammoths walked there, were trapped when the ice melted and the sea rose again. Inbreeding probably caused the mammoths’ descendants to become dwarfs.
Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana
Well, we’re not looking at restoring an entire mammoth population yet (although you’re right; it would be cool as hell). As a proponent of preservationism, Fidelius, you know well how difficult it is to restore a species that hasn’t gone extinct yet (wolves in Jellystone as an example). I can only imagine how much harder it would be to reintroduce a species that 20,000 years out of the loop.
But there is a growing popular fascination with cloning. I can envision billions of dollars spent on cloning long-extinct critters just because the technology allows it (or will soon) and people think it’s cool. I’m just afraid that Joe Sixpack will be more interested in seeing a single dodo than a thousand California condors.
In sum, the mammoth cloning, while apt to provide some fantastic research, looks to me to be a parlor trick and a publicity stunt.
Just how cool is that? Do we want Homo to go extinct?
But then, if Homo is the culprit, maybe after we get cloning perfected, and all these resurrected species out there, we should pass a law against preserving Homo genes. I mean, I always thought there were all kinds of species (and other phenomena) out there wiping out other species before Homo ever thought of such possiblities or acquired the capability of doing so. Before we dispense with Homo, however, I would like to know exactly who gets to choose which species get resurrected. After all, some of those prehistoric denizens looked rather nasty and capable of wiping out all kinds of species. Let’s pick only those that feed on LLDs and MDs. . .and maybe politicians that don’t clean themselves up.
Elephas falconeri (as if we doubted) reached a shoulder height of .9 meters and was found on Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Crete, and Cyprus.
The dwarf (no size given) Elephas ‘celebensis’ lived on Java and in the Celebese.
The book gives no specific information on European lions, but “I read somewhere” that the once-common European lion was wiped out by trappers supplying the Roman games.
As for the lunatic who thought that the Earth rotated 90 degrees because of the heavy weight of the poles… We have this little problem called conservation of angular momentum. The amount of energy required to convert all that momentum would heat the Earth up into a nice glowing ball.