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Scientists Zero in on Reason for Mammoths' Demise
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
About 15,000 years ago, North America was home to an astonishing number of large plant-eating mammals--giant sloths, mastodons, mammoths. A thousand years later, they were all gone, wiped from the face of the Earth with sudden finality.
Scientists have floated a variety of possible explanations for this mass die-off, from climate change to a cataclysmic asteroid impact. But now a team of American researchers may be closing in on the answer, hidden in the thousands-year-old muck of an Indiana lake.
... The research focused on the amounts of the fungus Sporormiella present in the sediments, according to Jacquelyn Gill, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a co-author of the paper appearing in today's issue of the journal Science.
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