title: The changing role of mammal life histories in Late Quaternary extinction vulnerability on continents and islands.
abstract: Understanding extinction drivers in a human-dominated world is necessary to preserve biodiversity. We provide an overview of Quaternary extinctions and compare mammalian extinction events on continents and islands after human arrival in system-specific prehistoric and historic contexts. We highlight the role of body size and life-history traits in these extinctions. We find a significant size-bias except for extinctions on small islands in historic times. Using phylogenetic regression and classification trees, we find that while life-history traits are poor predictors of historic extinctions, those associated with difficulty in responding quickly to perturbations, such as small litter size, are good predictors of prehistoric extinctions. Our results are consistent with the idea that prehistoric and historic extinctions form a single continuing event with the same likely primary driver, humans, but the diversity of impacts and affected faunas is much greater in historic extinctions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20013-7012, USA lyonss2@si.edu.
authors.forename: S Kathleen
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-5112-2508
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Lyons
authors.affiliation: Department of Geology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA.
authors.forename: Joshua H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.affiliation: Department of Paleobiology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20013-7012, USA.
authors.forename: Danielle
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Fraser
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001, USA.
authors.forename: Felisa A
authors.initials: FA
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.affiliation: Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Knoxville, TN 37831, USA.
authors.forename: Alison
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Boyer
authors.affiliation: Department of Integrative Biology, U.C. Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3140, USA.
authors.forename: Emily
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lindsey
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94035, USA.
authors.forename: Alexis M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Mychajliw
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D049628:Body Size; D053476:Extinction, Biological; D006802:Human Activities; D006801:Humans; D062312:Islands; D008018:Life Cycle Stages; D008322:Mammals / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000145:classification / Q000502:physiology*; D010802:Phylogeny
keywords: body size; extinctions; human impacts; life history; mammals; megafauna