DR. MAIRIN BALISI
National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow

La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, University of California, Merced

WHEN:  April 16, 2021 at Noon
WHERE: Seminar will be presented via Zoom

Please complete the RSVP FORM to receive the Zoom Meeting link. Forms can be submitted any time before the Seminar but not after 10:00am the day of the seminar

North America’s lost dogs: Recent ecological selectivity in the fossil record of mammalian carnivores

Large carnivorous mammals are rare in modern North American ecosystems, encouraging the perception that the costs of carnivory make diverse predator assemblages unsustainable. However, the rich fossil record of North American canids (dogs) reveals that large predators typically were not disadvantaged over the last 40 million years until approximately 11,000 years ago. This suggests that our current predator-poor scenario is the product of recent ecomorphological selectivity, inviting inquiry into how surviving carnivore species have changed through multiple environmental perturbations at the end of the last Ice Age.

Everyone is welcome to join the seminar, please complete the RSVP FORM to receive the Zoom link. Forms can be submitted any time before the seminar but not after 10:00am the day of the seminar.