ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Extinct New Zealand megafauna were not in decline before human colonization.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Population structure ofRoyal Society open science · 2024Article
- A nuclear genome assembly of an extinct flightless bird, the little bush moa.Science advances · 2024Article
- Phylogeography reveals the complex impact of the Last Glacial Maximum on New Zealand's terrestrial biota.Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand · 2024Review
- Theory and classification of mass extinction causation.National science review · 2024Review
- Thirty years of ancient DNA and the faunal biogeography of Aotearoa New Zealand: lessons and future directions.Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand · 2024Review
- Interpreting past trophic ecology of a threatened alpine parrot, kea Nestor notabilis, from museum specimens.The Journal of animal ecology · 2023Article
- A new chronology for the Māori settlement of Aotearoa (NZ) and the potential role of climate change in demographic developments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Ancient proteins resolve controversy over the identity ofProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Genetic evidence for post-glacial expansion from a southern refugium in the eastern moa (Biology letters · 2022Article
- Article
- Ancient DNA preserved in small bone fragments from the P.W. Lund collection.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- The demography of extinction in eastern North American birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Uncovering the genomic and metagenomic research potential in old ethanol-preserved snakes.PloS one · 2021Article
- Disappearance of Icelandic Walruses Coincided with Norse Settlement.Molecular biology and evolution · 2019Article
- Article
- Unique parasite aDNA in moa coprolites from New Zealand suggests mass parasite extinctions followed human-induced megafauna extinctions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Human Perceptions of Megafaunal Extinction Events Revealed by Linguistic Analysis of Indigenous Oral Traditions.Human ecology: an interdisciplinary journal · 2018Article
- Humans and climate change drove the Holocene decline of the brown bear.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Human evolution: a tale from ancient genomes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Invader or resident? Ancient-DNA reveals rapid species turnover in New Zealand little penguins.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The extinction of New Zealand's moa (Aves: Dinornithiformes) followed the arrival of humans in the late 13th century and was the final event of the prehistoric Late Quaternary megafauna extinctions. Determining the state of the moa populations in the pre-extinction period is fundamental to understanding the causes of the event. We sampled 281 moa individuals and combined radiocarbon dating with ancient DNA analyses to help resolve the extinction debate and gain insights into moa biology. The samples, which were predominantly from the last 4,000 years preceding the extinction, represent four sympatric moa species excavated from five adjacent fossil deposits. We characterized the moa assemblage using mitochondrial DNA and nuclear microsatellite markers developed specifically for moa. Although genetic diversity differed significantly among the four species, we found that the millennia preceding the extinction were characterized by a remarkable degree of genetic stability in all species, with no loss of heterozygosity and no shifts in allele frequencies over time. The extinction event itself was too rapid to be manifested in the moa gene pools. Contradicting previous claims of a decline in moa before Polynesian settlement in New Zealand, our findings indicate that the populations were large and stable before suddenly disappearing. This interpretation is supported by approximate Bayesian computation analyses. Our analyses consolidate the disappearance of moa as the most rapid, human-facilitated megafauna extinction documented to date.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.