Mastodons Driven To Extinction By Tuberculosis, Fossils Suggest

National Geographic ^ | 10-3-2006 | Kimberly Johnson

[blam]

Tuberculosis works, I always figured a virus.

There just weren't enough people to kill all these animals.

[JRios1968]

Another of Karl Rove's evil plots...

[blam]

GGG Ping.

[GQuagmire]

Prehistoric Bush's Fault!

[vox_freedom]

Pushed along by global warming.
If only mastodons used solar power instead of burning fossil fuels, it would have been so different.

[techcor]

Didn't Farside have a cartoon of dinosaurs smoking with the caption of "what really killed the dinosaurs"?

[GQuagmire]

Too bad Algore wasn't Caveman President then...
Mastadon.........it's what's for dinner..
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........mastadon

[Coyoteman]

Good information, thanks!

[nuconvert]

pong

[Horatio Gates]

That bacteria has some serious longevity. I recall reading about some bone evidence of TB on mummies in Egypt but mastodons? Wow.

Hate to get coughed on by a mastodon

[lormand]

Anyone who knows anything about the environment should know that the internal combustion engine killed the mastadons.

[Battle Axe]

Would the humans that killed and ate a Mastodon get TB from eating the meat??

I know you can get it from drinking the milk of an infected cow.

I don't completely buy the die off. 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.

But these things are so big and so slow to reproduce that it could be...

[sgtbono2002]

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.

[Deathmonger]

Castro quarantined the mastodons?

[Chickensoup]

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.

[Fatuncle]

Prehistoric Bush's Fault!

That's a damned lie!

He used Karl Rove's time machine.

[sgtbono2002]

Castro didnt quarantine the Mastodons. He quarantined the Aids ridden queers. The only one who had sense enough to do it.

[VeniVidiVici]

TB? Maybe the mastadonians had to deal with illegal alien TRex.

[muawiyah]

So, try this one on ~ as long as the Mastadons constituted a large mobile biomass infected with TB, human beings were unable to successfully settle the Americas (although we know the Dire-wolves and Saber-toothed tigers did a good job of that as well).

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.

[muawiyah]

Another mystery about the people in the Americas is why didn't they domesticate the bison, America's wild cattle.

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.