Modern Lessons from Ancient Food Webs
By Justin D. Yeakel, Jennifer A. Dunne
From the Cambrian Burgess Shale to ancient Egypt, food webs share surprising structural attributes. When redundancy is lost, the threat of extinction grows.
From the Cambrian Burgess Shale to ancient Egypt, food webs share surprising structural attributes. When redundancy is lost, the threat of extinction grows.
DOI: 10.1511/2015.114.188
About 10,000 years ago, one could have mistaken the Egyptian landscape for that of East Africa today. Instead of vast arid deserts, the region north of Aswan held enough annual precipitation to support large herbivores that are strongly tied to standing bodies of water, including zebra, elephant, and rhinoceros. Lions, wild dogs, giraffes, and wildebeest filled out the savanna-woodland landscape, while the earliest pyramids were still thousands of years in the future.
Griffith Institute/University of Oxford
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