Posted on 10/03/2006 3:01:37 PM PDT by blam
Mastodons Driven to Extinction by Tuberculosis, Fossils Suggest
Kimberly Johnson
for National Geographic News
October 3, 2006
Tuberculosis was rampant in North American mastodons during the late Ice Age and may have led to their extinction, researchers say.
Mastodons lived in North America starting about 2 million years ago and thrived until 11,000 years ago—around the time humans arrived on the continent—when the last of the 7-ton (6.35-metric-ton) elephantlike creatures died off.
Scientists Bruce Rothschild and Richard Laub pieced together clues to the animals' widespread die-off by studying unearthed mastodon foot bones.
Rothschild first noticed a telltale tuberculosis lesion on a bone at an excavation site in New York in 2001.
"His eye was caught by a particular bone—a metacarpal, the equivalent to one of the long bones in the palm of the hand," said Laub, who is also curator of geology at the Buffalo Museum of Science.
"He noticed a feature on the bone indicative of tuberculosis."
Rothschild, a practicing physician and an expert on ancient diseases, went on to study 113 mastodon skeletons across the continent. He found that 59 of them, or 52 percent, had the tuberculosis lesions.
Based on the finding, it's likely that virtually every late Ice Age mastodon in North America had tuberculosis, Laub says.
Tuberculosis causes grooved erosion in bones. While the disease didn't kill the ancient animals directly, it certainly weakened them, Rothschild says, likening their deaths to events that lead up to an airplane crash.
"You don't have a crash from one thing going wrong," he said. "It's multiple factors."
The research findings were published recently in the German science journal Naturwissenschaften.
There just weren't enough people to kill all these animals.
Another of Karl Rove's evil plots...
GGG Ping.
Prehistoric Bush's Fault!
Didn't Farside have a cartoon of dinosaurs smoking with the caption of "what really killed the dinosaurs"?
Too bad Algore wasn't Caveman President then...
Mastadon.........it's what's for dinner..
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........mastadon
Good information, thanks!
pong
Hate to get coughed on by a mastodon
Anyone who knows anything about the environment should know that the internal combustion engine killed the mastadons.
Tuburculosis, and here thanks to the queers and their aids we sit facing tuburculosis again. We had it whipped too.
Like the treatment for tuburculosis many years ago if we had segregated infected AIDS patients we wouldnt be in the mess we are now. But hey: That would have been discrimination. Wouldnt have been Politically Correct. I have to give Castro credit , He did it.
Castro quarantined the mastodons?
With natural selection there should have been some mutation that would have kept a segment of the population alive.....at least we would expect that is a viable population.
Unless of course, natural selection is a myth....
giggling as I tiptoe out of the room.
That's a damned lie!
He used Karl Rove's time machine.
Castro didnt quarantine the Mastodons. He quarantined the Aids ridden queers. The only one who had sense enough to do it.
TB? Maybe the mastadonians had to deal with illegal alien TRex.
Only after the Mastadons had, for all practical purposes, died out were humans able to move across Bering and down the West Coast.
Another thought along that line is why earlier human populations in the Americas seem to have died out and not been replaced for tens of thousands of years ~ when Mastadons with TB crossed over from Siberia to the Americas, they infected the people who then died leaving no progeny.
After all, people all over the world domesticated wild cattle numerous times without all dieing out ~ were the Indians stupid, or what?!
Knowing that brucellosis is endemic among American bison, any tribe that attemped to domestic them would probably last only one generation and die out without progeny.
This particular disease is found worldwide, and it's a wonder any cattle at all were ever successfully domesticated.
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