Pre Ice age animals

[SawTooth]

I am working on a personal project that Google has chosen to not help me with, so I figured that someone here on the forum could help me. I am trying to find out what animals died at the beginning of the ice age because of the ice age, Google just tells me animals that died at the end of the ice age (mammoths, mastodons, sloths, etc.). I'll need any help I can get. Thanks!

[Top Trilo]

I would search for what went extinct at the end of the Pliocene. Perhaps rephrasing the search would bring more results. When I searched "end Pliocene extinction" I got lots of results about marine megafauna going extinct.

[SawTooth]

1 hour ago, Top Trilo said:

I would search for what went extinct at the end of the Pliocene. Perhaps rephrasing the search would bring more results. When I searched "end Pliocene extinction" I got lots of results about marine megafauna going extinct.

Thanks, but this relates to radiation from supernovas more than the ice age. I don't know much about that area though, so if you could explain or send a link about that I would appreciate that.

[Shellseeker]

It is a very difficult question. Do not look for certainty.  There are numerous disagreements between scientists about when the Pliocene started and ended,  and when the Pleistocene started and ended.

If appropriate , let's narrow your question somewhat to the State of Florida, and if we can be successful there we can extrapolate to the rest of the world that had different fauna during different ages.  Let's discuss the Blancan North American Land Animal Age.

Fortunately,  you can read everything about it, and contact scientists at the University of Florida who have studied it. 

https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/florida-vertebrate-fossils/land-mammal-ages/blancan/

Quote from above:

Quote

Basis of name: The Blancan NALMA takes its name from the Blanco Formation, a sedimentary rock unit found in Crosby and Lubbock counties in the southern Texas Panhandle. The Blancan is represented by many hundreds individual vertebrate fossil sites distributed from Canada to Central America (Bell et al., 2004). There are about 100 Blancan sites in Florida (Table 1); about half from four counties in southwestern Florida (Charlotte, Sarasota, Hendry, and DeSoto). The boundaries of the Blancan and its correlation with the Pliocene or Pleistocene epochs of the geologic time scale have varied considerably since it was first named by Wood et al. (1941). The Blancan is divided into two subintervals: the Bl1 from 4.75 to 2.6 million years ago; and the Bl2 from 2.6 to 1.6 million years ago. Under this scheme, the Bl1 correlates with most of the Pliocene Epoch while the Bl2 is very early Pleistocene under the current geologic time scale.

 

So to rephrase your question a little,  you are interested in understanding what fauna existed in the Blancan B12 and went extinct at the start of the Pleistocene. You have quite a little work to do to to identify the paleontologists who have expertise in this space and to point to research papers that might lead to the answer. @digit has contacts at University of Florida and may have some suggestions.

 

Edited July 3, 2022 by Shellseeker

[Top Trilo]

This could be a starting point for your research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Piacenzian_extinctions 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pleistocene_extinctions

[siteseer]

1 hour ago, SawTooth said:

Thanks, but this relates to radiation from supernovas more than the ice age. I don't know much about that area though, so if you could explain or send a link about that I would appreciate that.

 

Are you looking worldwide or just North America?  As far as I know, there was no major extinction event at the end of the Pliocene.  There were some extinctions at the end of the Miocene.  Mollusks along the Atlantic coast seemed to have died out across the Pliocene but this has been explained as tropical species being unable to move south and unable to adapt to cooling conditions.  I haven't read of anything dying out because of supernova radiation.  In fact, the Pleistocene is marked by the arrival of mammoths in North America.  A mammoth would be as vulnerable to increased radiation levels as any mammal and would certainly be more exposed and yet they thrived early in the Pleistocene and some even survived beyond the end of the Pleistocene into historic times. 

[SawTooth]

25 minutes ago, siteseer said:

 

Are you looking worldwide or just North America?  As far as I know, there was no major extinction event at the end of the Pliocene.  There were some extinctions at the end of the Miocene.  Mollusks along the Atlantic coast seemed to have died out across the Pliocene but this has been explained as tropical species being unable to move south and unable to adapt to cooling conditions.  I haven't read of anything dying out because of supernova radiation.  In fact, the Pleistocene is marked by the arrival of mammoths in North America.  A mammoth would be as vulnerable to increased radiation levels as any mammal and would certainly be more exposed and yet they thrived early in the Pleistocene and some even survived beyond the end of the Pleistocene into historic times. 

North America, I am just looking for animals that died because of the temperature change from the last ice age.

[Crusty_Crab]

This article gives a good background about ice ages and glaciation events. https://www.livescience.com/58407-how-often-do-ice-ages-happen.html

 

To summarize, there have been 5 ice ages, or glaciation events, the most recent being the Quaternary glaciation (2.7 mya to present). Within the most recent Quaternary glaciation, there have been mini ice ages called glacials, which are caused by Milankovitch cycles. This was pioneering research, which demonstrated that the glacials can be correlated with changes in the earth's tilt, wobble and orbit around the sun. Colloquially, when people talk about the last ice age with mammoths and North American megafauna, they refer to the most recent glacial about 11,700 years ago. 

 

Milankovitch cycles occur around 100,000 year cycles. Again, from the article, "Ice sheets grow for about 90,000 years and then take about 10,000 years to collapse during warmer periods." Perhaps we don't see mass extinctions from the onset of ice ages because organisms have about 90,000 years to adapt or migrate, whereas it only takes 10,000 years to collapse? There is also a school of thought that the extinction of mammoths and other megafauna was due to human predation. 

 

Lastly, even though we call it an "ice age", it is not true that everywhere was covered in a uniform layer of ice. For example, the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa was known to be free of ice, while it was surrounded by vast glaciers on all sides. Its possible areas such as these acted as refuges so that once the glaciers receded, their inhabitants could re-emerge and repopulate the landscape. 

[erose]

On 7/3/2022 at 9:00 PM, SawTooth said:

North America, I am just looking for animals that died because of the temperature change from the last ice age.

The build up of glaciers probably drove animals south more than it killed them. Just a SWAG on my part…

[siteseer]

2 hours ago, erose said:

The build up of glaciers probably drove animals south more than it killed them. Just a SWAG on my part…

 

Right, someone once showed me what he said was a musk ox tooth that was found in Iowa, which is about as far south as the glaciers got in North America  That would be an unusual find but I didn't have a camera with me at the time.  I thought it might be a bison tooth or even just an aged-looking cow tooth but it did seem different.

Edited July 8, 2022 by siteseer

[erose]

3 hours ago, siteseer said:

 

Right, someone once showed me what he said was a musk ox tooth that was found in Iowa, which is about as far south as the glaciers got in North America  That would be an unusual find but I didn't have a camera with me at the time.  I thought it might be a bison tooth or even just an aged-looking cow tooth but it did seem different.

I have a partial caribou antler from Big Brook New Jersey. Glaciers retreated from there around 18,000 years ago.