The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

by Peter Brannen

In New Zealand, the fossil record for outlandish flightless birds called moas shows the colossal birds—some taller than a basketball hoop—handling the finicky climate of the Pleistocene sanguinely, marching up and down the island as the earth wobbled in and out of the sunshine. But 500 years ago, the Maori arrived in New Zealand and the moas disappeared. The extinction puzzled UCLA ornithologist and geographer Jared Diamond, also the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel. He thought the idea that human artifice alone could cause the extinctions was ridiculous on its face. He shed his skepticism while working in the remote and inaccessible Gauttier Mountains of New Guinea, where he encountered an utterly fearless tree kangaroo. Until I had worked in the Gauttiers, I was mystified to understand how the few Maoris in the vastness of New Zealand’s South Island could have killed all the moas, and how anyone could take seriously the Mosimann-Martin hypothesis of Clovis hunters eliminating most large mammals from North and South America in a millennium or so. I no longer find this at all surprising when I recall the large kangaroo Dendrolagus matschiei remaining on a tree trunk at a height of 2 meters, watching my field assistant and me as we talked nearby in full sight. It is this naïveté about humans that may account for many of the extinctions. Besides, how could any animal have any idea that this strange, bipedal mammal, smaller than some deer and lacking fearsome claws or teeth, ...