Mike,

Did you get what you need for the bio bit? Here are my high spots. They may sound unconventional, but I did the best I could given a lifetime of lucky breaks. Being the only child of college educated, farm raised, middle aged, Anabaptist parents and born at the start of the presidency of Herbert Hoover helped. Don’t underestimate Sunday drives along the Brandywine with cannon from the American Revolution left as monuments and gypsies and hobos in the Pa. piedmont. At age 40 my Dad retrained himself at the University of Pennsylvania’s Veterinary College; fellow students in their 20s called him “Pops.”

In 1946 I went to Cornell to study ornithology (zoology), hoping to get to the tropics as soon as possible. In my Sophomore year I served as a field assistant to E. P. (Buck) Edwards when he worked on his thesis on the birds of the Lake Patzcuaro drainage in Michoacan, Mexico. We collected ducks on Lake Patzcuaro with Charles Sibley when Sibley was still a grad student at Berkeley.

Through kindness of the Canadian, Frank (Pancho) Harrison, I spent a month in southern Tamaulipas collecting birds for George Sutton in the then unknown Rancho del Cielo cloud forest with Liquidambar (sweet gum) and endemic oaks over 100 feet tall in the canopy. This is at the northern limit of the tropical conifer, Podocarpus; the forest attracted brocket deer (Mazama), jaguar, tinamou, guans and singing quail (Dactylortyx). The U. of Texas at Brownsville owns a field camp up there. The bedrock is cavernous Cretaceous limestone which harbored then undescribed species of plethodontid salamanders.

At the University of Michigan I “dissertated” on reptiles and amphibians of the Gomez Farias region (sea level to 8000 feet in southern Tamaulipas) at the University of Michigan’s Department of Zoology; where I debated late Quaternary extinctions of American megafauna with paleontologist Claude Hibbard and modeled overkill with the invaluable statistical treatment of James E. Mosiman.

The book you mention summarizes most of what I’ve learned and modeled for vertebrate extinctions in radiocarbon time, thanks in part to a postdoc at Yale with ecologist Ed Deevey where I learned Pleistocene pollen analysis with help of J. Iversen then on leave from the Danish Geological Survey.

On a postdoc summer in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona I discovered that there were fossil mammoths in alluvial deposits in southern Arizona at (some thought after) the end of the Pleistocene and a year later I won a job in the Geochronology Program at the University of Arizona after a postdoc at the Universite de Montreal in Quebec, Canada where I helped Gordon Lowther of McGill with an inter-University (McGill-Montreal) seminar on the Quaternary.

By then I was married with two kids and a third on the way. With an NSF grant I found a real job (from which I’m fully retired) at the University of Arizona’s Geochronology Labs off campus on Tumamoc Hill where my new boss, Ted Smiley, showed me the most extraordinary thing I had seen to date, the dung balls of the extinct Shasta Ground sloth from Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon. Some of my travel was to make trips when I could, given the prognosis of a post-polio residual.

At the Desert Lab I taught courses in the Geochronology Department and soon had students that knew a good deal more than I had managed to learn about fossil pollen, extinct ice age animals, Quaternary geology and environmental education. One of them, Dave Steadman, has a new (2006) book (Univ. Chicago Press) on bird extinctions on oceanic islands, especially in the Pacific. The extinctions of island birds correlate very closely with the time of human arrivals. Guam Rails raised in captivity would restart rail evolution on ever so many islands where they were eliminated by Polynesian Rats. Don’t miss it.

I aspire to be a good natural historian especially attentive to change within radiocarbon time (last 40,000 years). I enjoy bird watching in my back yard in Tucson, and still get caught up in fierce arguments among misguided peers about what caused continental megafaunal and island bird extinction in radiocarbon time.

I’m amazed at the number of gainsayers that can’t or won’t see the overwhelming case for prehistoric people as the forcing function for large and many small mammal and bird extinctions, especially in the Americas in the last 40,000 years. It may not be an idea whose time has come, but it is certainly coming. For good reading don’t miss Tim Flannery’s books on the extinction story, especially the one he copyrighted in 2001 about extinctions in the United States. He had the Harvard postdoc targeted for Australians and requesting simply that the recipient write a book in return for the Fellowship.

– Paul S. Martin, Emeritus Professor of Geosciences, Desert Laboratory, University of Arizona.

PS: All this folds naturally into unconventional ideas about introduction of Afro-Asian megafauna from other continents into ours. In New Mexico a ranch is establishing Bolson tortoises that once lived north of the border and as you well know wild horses and burros may be doing too well in parts of the west. I was blown away by a visit several years ago to the “Equid Sanctuary” in northern New Mexico a vision if there ever was one into the North American Pleistocene.

Any suggestions or counter-arguments to the idea of returning Proboscidea to this Hemisphere? American elephants checked out only 13,000 calendar years ago, which is just about right for the arrival of Clovis Paleoindians. A change in fire frequency around then can certainly be considered. Archaeologists rooting for much earlier arrival of Homo sapiens hate the proposition that the chronology of human arrival might coincide with megafaunal extinction. I expected rough reviews of my Univ. Calif. Press (2005) book but most look good.

The bottom line? I continue to study megafaunal extinctions in radiocarbon time and try to keep abreast of new developments and wild visions in related fields. Charles Kay’s e-mails definitely help. His summary accounts of wolves are intriguing.

PPS: I rarely visit my office anymore but I take calls on my home phone. None of the above is copy-righted if anyone wants to know. A few e-mail responses would be welcome, if on target. Finally none of this message would have been possible without the collaboration of my spouse, Mary Kay O’Rourke. — Paul