When I asked self-styled “museum artist” Beth Zaiken if I could use her evocative painting of a mammoth for a story, she was quick to point out that the image I attached was not just a mammoth, it was a woolly mammoth. Turns out, mammoths came in many shapes and sizes, with woolly mammoths particularly celebrated over […]
extinction
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Dinosaurs Died, Mammals Thrived
Ten minutes before a huge space rock — as wide as Humboldt Bay and half as long — barreled through Earth’s atmosphere 66 million years ago, ending the Mesozoic Era with a bang, the ecological balance between dinosaurs and mammals was working fine. The two groups had been living and thriving alongside each other for […]
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Karuk Tribe: Spring Chinook Creeping Toward Extinction
A survey of spring Chinook salmon on the Klamath River has returned one of the lowest numbers in decades, spotting only 95 of the fish where hundreds of thousands once swam, according to the Karuk Tribe. “It’s devastating for our community,” said Karen Greenberg, restoration director for the Salmon River Restoration Council in a press […]
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Prey-go-neesh One Step Closer to Soaring in Humboldt Skies
After nearly a century, California condors will soon once again soar over Yurok ancestral lands, the culmination of years of work by the tribe on behalf of the bird Yurok people know as prey-go-neesh. Nearly lost to extinction in the 1980s, condors are integrally connected to the Yurok Tribe and others in the region, where […]
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HumBug: The Current Mass Extinction
There have been five major mass extinction events in the fossil record. Some folks claim the human race is causing the sixth right now. Dumping massive amounts of greenhouse gasses, saturating the world with never before seen chemicals and introducing all manner of non-native species willy nilly are touted as the major causes. I have a […]