Animal Extinction

By about 10,000 years ago, nearly 100 species of large animals had been recently driven to extinction around the globe. This march of mega fauna [mortality:incidents] coincides suspiciously with the arrival of another large animal in their vicinity: humans. The die-off in South America [included:inducted] giant ground sloths and armadillo-like animals the size of cars known as glyptodonts. And the deaths seem responsible for the dearth of [nutrients:neuroscientist] in Amazon rainforest soils today. So says a study in the journal Nature Geoscience. Plainly put, these big animals disperse a lot of phosphorous in their feces. Once the big animals are gone, there's no way for the phosphorous to get from one part of the rainforest to another. As a result, the Amazon rainforest even today is struggling to recover from that loss of [fertility:adaptability] . Other parts of the world face the same poop paucity predicament, according to the researchers' model.