Mass Extinction

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XIV

   PDF

2. Mass Extinction - a general view

   • Ashraf M. T. Elewa

   Pages 1-4

3. Late Ordovician mass extinction

   • Ashraf M. T. Elewa

   Pages 5-7

4. The End Ordovician; an ice age in the middle of a greenhouse

   • Curtis R. Congreve

   Pages 9-19

5. Silurian global events – at the tipping point of climate change

   • Mikael Calner

   Pages 21-57

6. Late Devonian mass extinction

   • Ashraf M. T. Elewa

   Pages 59-60

7. Late Permian mass extinction

   • Ashraf M. T. Elewa

   Pages 61-62

8. Late Triassic mass extinction

   • Ashraf M. T. Elewa

   Pages 63-64

9. Reexamination of the end-Triassic mass

   • Spencer G. Lucas, Lawrence H. Tanner

   Pages 65-102

10. Cenomanian/Turonian mass extinction of macroinvertebrates in the context of Paleoecology; A case study from North Wadi Qena, Eastern Desert, Egypt

    • Ahmed Awad Abdelhady

    Pages 103-127

11. K-Pg mass extinction

    • Ashraf M.T. Elewa

    Pages 129-131

12. Causes of mass extinction at the K/Pg boundary: A case study from the North African Plate

    • Ashraf M.T. Elewa, Ahmed M. Dakrory

    Pages 133-148

13. Patterns and causes of mass extinction at the K/Pg boundary: Planktonic foraminifera from the North African Plate

    • Ashraf M.T. Elewa, Ahmed M. Dakrory

    Pages 149-158

14. Quaternary extinctions in Southeast Asia

    • Julien Louys

    Pages 159-189

15. Current mass extinction

    • Ashraf M. T. Elewa

    Pages 191-194

16. Current insect extinctions

    • Panos V. Petrakis

    Pages 195-249

17. Back Matter

    Pages 251-252

    PDF

P. David Polly Department of Geological Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA, pdpolly@indiana.edu Only 200 years ago, extinction was a radical new idea. Fossils were known, but their identity as the remains of species that no longer lived on the face of the Earth was not yet firmly established in the scientific world. Arguments that these organic-looking objects from the rocks were merely bizarre mineralizations or that they were the remains of species still living th in unexplored regions of the world had dominated 18 Century interpretations of fossils. But the settling of North America and other colonial expeditions by Europeans were quickly making the world smaller. In 1796 Cuvier painstakingly demonstrated that the anatomy of the mastodon skeleton from Big Bone Lick in Kentucky could not possibly belong to a modern elephant, unlike the mammoth fossils found in Europe, which are so similar to the living African Elephant that many found plausible the explanation that they were bones of animals used by the Roman army. Any doubt that Cuvier’s mastodon still lived in the wilds of the western North American interior was crushed ten years later when the Lewis and Clark expedition failed to find any sign of them.

• Devonian
• Ice Age
• Ordovician
• Permian
• Silurian
• Triassic
• current mass extinction
• desert
• ecology
• insects
• invertebrates
• mammals
• mass extinction
• minor extinction
• plankton
• historical geology

• Minia University Fac. Science Dept. Geology, Minia 61519, Egypt

  Ashraf M.T. Elewa

Ashraf Elewa is currently a professor at the University of Minia, Egypt, from where he earned his B.Sc in Geology and his M. Sc. in Lithostratigraphy and Paleontology, and finally his Ph.D. in Micropalentology. His fields of research range from paleontology to traditional  and geometric morphometrics and systematics and evolutionary trends in ostracoda.

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