Impact killed the pleistocene megafauna?

I have no idea how often I have tried to find a PNAS "early release" cited in a news story, only to find no such paper on the webpage. It comes out eventually, but the release date is often off by a week or more. Very aggravating.

Because PNAS publishes daily online, you may read about an article in the news media on Monday or Tuesday, but the article may not publish online until later in the week. You may use the CiteTrack feature to set up an e-mail alert to notify you as soon as the article you are interested in publishes. [Learn more about Early Edition]

"This is a cool idea."

Yes, it is claimed to be responsible for the Younger Dryas, about a thousand years of cool. And it does seem to agree with all the available evidence, so far...

P.S. The spell check is back! Thank you. :)

I get automated e-mail notices of relevant PNAS articles, and it hasn't come across. Given the nature of the large mammal extinctions of the North American holocene, as articulated by John Alroy (Sciende 292, 2001, 1893-1896), the "impact" was largely human.

As someone with press access to PNAS, i can't tell you how annoying this is. Pretty much every journal lifts the embargo on a story within a few hours of when the publication goes live. PNAS is the exception - their embargo lift is Monday evening, and it covers everything that will appear in their early access over the course of the rest of the week. So, it may take nearly a week for the actual article to appear in the early edition.

My readers hate it, and i have to make special note of this for every story i cover out of PNAS.

Try the DOI daily and hope for the best....

The info I saw seems to come from this Brown Univ. press release of Sept. 24.
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2007-08/07-040.html.

The following are interesting abstracts from the May AGU mtg you mentioned.

Very interesting.
-- Al

I forgot the link to the abstracts...
http://www.agu.org/meetings/sm07/sm07-sessions/sm07_PP41A.html

-- Al

PWEEZE WHET IT BE THAT WHAT IS A "COOL IDEA'" GIVE US SOME HOPE THAT THE IGNORANT MASSES WILL CONTINUE TO OVERLOOK, IGNORE OUR (MACRO-E PROPONENTS) PHILOSOPHICAL PROJECTIONS, AND CONTINUE TO "SWALLOW" OUR PUBLICLY SUPPORTED (TO THIS POINT) (THROUGH THOSE WHO HAVE THE POWER TO CONTROL THE BROADCAST CAPABILITIES FOR THEIR OWN, AND OH BY THE WAY, (WHO EVER CAN PAY THEIR BEHINDS AND WE WILL ACCOMMODATE YOUR PHILOSOPHICAL (PERSONAL PREFERENCES) AGENDAS) FAMOUS SPECULATIONS AS THEY ALWAYS HAVE...... FORTUNATELY OF THE SAKE OF REALITY, YOU MACRO-EVOLUTIONARY CLODS ARE BEING EXPOSED AS "ESOTERIC" "BOVINE EXCREMENT" ARTISTS. THERE ARE MORE AND MORE PEOPLE EVERY DAY WHO CAN SEE YOUR VAST DEFICITS REGARDING YOUR PHILOSOPHICAL ASSERTIONS CLAIMING STAKE TO HOW (THROUGH PURELY NATURAL (AS YOUR VASTLY INSUFFICIENT "SCIENTIFIC PROCESSES" AS CURRENTLY DESCRIBED, EXPLAINED AND SCIENTIFICALLY DEMONSTRATED BY THE MACRO-EVOLUTIONARY PRIESTS THAT IN REAL SCIENTIFIC TERMS, ARE KNOWN, UNDERSTOOD AND APPLIED TO THE VAST ARRAY OF CONTRARY RESULTS THAT AS WE KNOW ARE ONLY PARTIALLY OBSERVED LET ALONE ADEQUATELY DESCRIBED WITHOUT ANY KIND OF SIGNIFICANTLY SCIENTIFICALLY SUPPORTED "ASSERTIONS" AS TO HOW THE F THESE ECOSYSTEMS ACTUALLY DEVELOPED OVER (WHO GIVES A S , BILLIONS OF YEARS) You BELOVED BRETHEREN ARE stoned (on public funds and perceptions regarding comfortable retirements at ages well below what ordinary citizens can look forward to) self serving sons of PROMULGATORS OF SUCKULATION!!!!!!! When you look up at the sky tonight and wonder at the "beauty" what-ever the hell that is, and how the hell did "natural selection" through RANDOM mutations (how many of those would be required you stupid people) have the capabiltieS required for such phenomena TOTALLY UNDEMONSTRATED BY SCIENCE TO SELECTIVELY PROGRESS TOWARD SUCH AN ARRAY OF (UNDESCRIBABLE, FULLY UNMEASURABLE CONCIOUS PHENOMENA.

i can imagine you idiots will edit this out too.

Hey dude, I think your capslock key is stuck...

Neal, it's an okay parody, but I think you went a bit overboard.

Neal, last time we covered adding bolding as yet another overemphasis technique you could use, and I showed you how to add the proper tags so you could say witty things like:

I am a GREAT TWIT!!!!

today, I instruct you in the use of the italics tag. very simple, really, since all you need do is substitute "i" for "b" (the bold tag) you learned in the previous lesson.

now you can do REALLY COOL stuff, and really add visual interest to your insane ramblings.

you can even combine multiple tags:

you are one DEMENTED FUCKWIT!!!!!

see?

Neal, last time we covered adding bolding as yet another overemphasis technique you could use, and I showed you how to add the proper tags so you could say witty things like:

I am a GREAT TWIT!!!!

today, I instruct you in the use of the italics tag. very simple, really, since all you need do is substitute "i" for "b" (the bold tag) you learned in the previous lesson.

now you can do REALLY COOL stuff, and really add visual interest to your insane ramblings.

you can even combine multiple tags:

you are one DEMENTED FUCKWIT!!!!!

see?

Hey Neal,

You own us at least 4 right parentheses in just this post alone.

HTH,
Don

Hush, Neal. The grown-ups are talking.

Neal,
It's cool because its an example of science in action. No one excpects you to find it that way, because your brain seems stuck in a rhetoric loop.

Given Neal's obvious insanity, why are his posts not being blocked or bounced to the bathroom wall?

Dumping to the bathroom wall is off line, and whether to unpublish a comment is up to individual authors.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0706977104v1

It's an open access paper, so this link should work for everyone.

Awesome, thanks! I've always been very interested in the Pleistocene extinctions, and this looks *very* interesting.

(Looking at it, I thought: "Gee, IDers don't write papers that look anything like this!")

Jeffrey K McKee --- The megafauna had three strikes against them:

(1) climate change. Stressful, but all the species had survived previous rapid warmings and vegetative changes.

(2) human predation. Not at all clear how significant a factor, since there were plenty of large predators, really large, some of them.

(3) comet impact. Probably did not instantly kill all of the megafauna. But the triple whammy was enough so that minimal breeding populations could not be sustained.

Three strikes and you are out.

Interesting PNAS article. I wrote a blog article about this today and how it relates to Walt Brown's Hydroplate Theory of the Flood.

See http://afdave.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/youngest-meteor-impact-yet/

"This is quite interesting in view of Dr. Walter Brown’s Hydroplate Theory which postulates that Meteors, Asteroids and Comets are ejecta from the catastrophic breakup of the “fountains of the deep.”"
Well, it's different anyway.

afdave: Interesting PNAS article. I wrote a blog article about this today and how it relates to Walt Brown's Hydroplate Theory of the Flood. See http://afdave.wordpress.com/2007/09/28/youngest-meteor-impact-yet/

that is so not thure ok

that is so not thure ok

A fourth strike against megafauna would have been the introduction of diseases by humans, the animals accompanying humans or wild animals crossing the Beringia land bridge to North America.

By example, when Asian and African elephants are kept in zoos together, there is a danger of transmission of a herpesvirus that is lethal to asian elephants, but african elephants have a better immunity system against it.

Maybe the same thing happened with some megafauna.