ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2011
The ghosts of mammals past: biological and geographical patterns of global mammalian extinction across the Holocene.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
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34 citing papers in PubMed.
- Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts.Biology letters · 2025Article
- A Sixth Mass Extinction? How Linguistic Uncertainty Shapes Our Understanding of the Biodiversity Crisis.Ecology and evolution · 2024Review
- Response of diademed sifaka (Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- What passes through the extinction filter? Historical and contemporary patterns of vulnerability of the most extinction-prone bird family (Aves: Rallidae).Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Article
- Anthropogenic predictors of varying Holocene occurrence for Europe's large mammal fauna.Biology letters · 2023Article
- After the mammoths: The ecological legacy of late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2023Review
- Lost, gained, and regained functional and phylogenetic diversity of European mammals since 8000 years ago.Global change biology · 2022Article
- Stable isotopes reveal seasonal dietary responses to agroforestry in a venomous mammal, the Hispaniolan solenodon (Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Where the wild things were: intrinsic and extrinsic extinction predictors in the world's most depleted mammal fauna.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Functional traits of the world's late Quaternary large-bodied avian and mammalian herbivores.Scientific data · 2021Article
- Ancient DNA Suggests Single Colonization and Within-Archipelago Diversification of Caribbean Caviomorph Rodents.Molecular biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Collagen Sequence Analysis Reveals Evolutionary History of Extinct West Indies Nesophontes (Island-Shrews).Molecular biology and evolution · 2020Article
- The past and future human impact on mammalian diversity.Science advances · 2020Article
- Rapid size change associated with intra-island evolutionary radiation in extinct Caribbean "island-shrews".BMC evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- Homogenization of carnivorous mammal ensembles caused by global range reductions of large-bodied hypercarnivores during the late Quaternary.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Bias, incompleteness and the 'known unknowns' in the Holocene faunal record.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Article
- Mammal diversity will take millions of years to recover from the current biodiversity crisis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Forgotten Mediterranean calving grounds of grey and North Atlantic right whales: evidence from Roman archaeological records.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Insular threat associations within taxa worldwide.Scientific reports · 2018Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Although the recent historical period is usually treated as a temporal base-line for understanding patterns of mammal extinction, mammalian biodiversity loss has also taken place throughout the Late Quaternary. We explore the spatial, taxonomic and phylogenetic patterns of 241 mammal species extinctions known to have occurred during the Holocene up to the present day. To assess whether our understanding of mammalian threat processes has been affected by excluding these taxa, we incorporate extinct species data into analyses of the impact of body mass on extinction risk. We find that Holocene extinctions have been phylogenetically and spatially concentrated in specific taxa and geographical regions, which are often not congruent with those disproportionately at risk today. Large-bodied mammals have also been more extinction-prone in most geographical regions across the Holocene. Our data support the extinction filter hypothesis, whereby regional faunas from which susceptible species have already become extinct now appear less threatened; they may also suggest that different processes are responsible for driving past and present extinctions. We also find overall incompleteness and inter-regional biases in extinction data from the recent fossil record. Although direct use of fossil data in future projections of extinction risk is therefore not straightforward, insights into extinction processes from the Holocene record are still useful in understanding mammalian threat.
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