ReviewCambridge prisms. Extinction2024
The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions: Patterns, causes, ecological consequences and implications for ecosystem management in the Anthropocene.
Review in Cambridge prisms. Extinction, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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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
30 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Native and introduced megafauna have convergent effects on animals and ecosystems: a meta-analysis.Nature communications · 2026Pooled it
- Reevaluating introduced herbivores in conservation.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- Review
- Disturbance regimes drive widespread plant range disequilibrium in Europe alongside climate change.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Lower speciation, not higher extinction, drove African megaherbivore diversity collapse.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Emergent patterns of island biodiversity in the Anthropocene.Science advances · 2026Review
- Predictors of extinction risk in large tropical forest mammals: From global to local.Science advances · 2026Article
- A refined chronology of the Naumann's elephant (Palaeoloxodon naumanni) provides a new insight on factors of their extinction.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Personality Matters: Owner-Ascribed Personality Predicts Range Size Tendencies and Predation Behavior in Domestic Cats.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Volcanic forcing of global climate cooling at the Younger Dryas onset preserved in North American sediments.Science advances · 2026Article
- No evidence that hominin dispersal across Eurasia was part of a wider turnover in mammal distributions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A dataset of radiocarbon dates from Holarctic mammal collagen purified with high-quality chemistry.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Space-use by feral cattle and horses shapes vegetation structure in a trophic rewilding area.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2026Article
- Why it is easier to date Quaternary extinctions than human colonizations under conditions of overkill.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Article
- Many pasts, many futures: Navigating the complexities of species reshuffling to help prevent extinctions.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Review
- Article
- Persistent Genomic Erosion in Whooping Cranes Despite Demographic Recovery.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Article
- Asian elephants are associated with a more robust mammalian community in tropical forests.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- Using sedimentary ancient DNA in coastal and marine contexts to explore past human-environmental interactions in Australia.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Across the last ~50,000 years (the late Quaternary) terrestrial vertebrate faunas have experienced severe losses of large species (megafauna), with most extinctions occurring in the Late Pleistocene and Early to Middle Holocene. Debate on the causes has been ongoing for over 200 years, intensifying from the 1960s onward. Here, we outline criteria that any causal hypothesis needs to account for. Importantly, this extinction event is unique relative to other Cenozoic (the last 66 million years) extinctions in its strong size bias. For example, only 11 out of 57 species of megaherbivores (body mass ≥1,000 kg) survived to the present. In addition to mammalian megafauna, certain other groups also experienced substantial extinctions, mainly large non-mammalian vertebrates and smaller but megafauna-associated taxa. Further, extinction severity and dates varied among continents, but severely affected all biomes, from the Arctic to the tropics. We synthesise the evidence for and against climatic or modern human (
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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.