Emma Marris

“It puzzles me that the many large, now extinct mammals of the Pleistocene Epoch have nowhere near the legions of fans claimed by dinosaurs. Mammals win the popularity contests among existing animals, yet few children can rattle off the weights and dietary habits of the gargantuan North American ground sloth Megalonyx jeffersonii or Australia’s massive buck-toothed marsupial Diprotodon optatum. Stegosaurus gets all the love.

“One fanciful explanation is that we have an abiding guilt for having killed them all off in our spear-hurling days. And it seems likely that human hunting played some part in many of these extinctions. In Once and Future Giants, biologist and journalist Sharon Levy lays out the evidence for this theory — and explores what this species drain can teach us now. The patterns and consequences of the Pleistocene die-offs can help us to predict how landscapes will change if we lose big mammals, and help us to spot warning signs of impending extinctions.”

Read more about Levy’s new book on extinct megafauna here.

When the Killing’s Done centers around a real campaign to remove exotic species from California’s Channel Islands. I review the book here.

This is my second Nature story this year to run with a picture of the Channel Island fox. I also talked about the handsome creature in this online story about how network models might help conservationists prevent extinction cascades…by removing key species at key time points. Counter-intuitive but compelling stuff.

A small group of ecologists is looking beyond the pristine to study the scrubby, feral and untended. Emma Marris learns to appreciate ‘novel ecosystems’.

A Nature feature from July 2009.

What does it mean to save a species? For some, preserving the American bison means keeping its genome pure, finds Emma Marris.

A feature in Nature from February 2009.

A tragicomic memoir for Wired Magazine (May 2008). My dad was an excellent sport about it, by the way.

A review of Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel By Michio Kaku for the Christian Science Monitor in April 2008.

“There is a certain grim satisfaction to finding out that to make Harry Potter invisible without a special shield ‘one would have to liquefy him, boil him to create steam, crystallize him, heat him again, and then cool him.’ Take that, boy wizard.”

A Nature feature from 2007 on conservation priorities. Here’s the lede:

Richard Cowling was playing with maps of South Africa on a computer screen when he had his epiphany. He was designing a conservation plan for the Cape Floristic Region, or fynbos, an arid landscape of shrubs and flowers that contains some 9,000 species, many unique to the area. Some of these, such as the mandala-like sunset blooms of the protea flowers, are spectacular. Some — like the geometric tortoises, whose fetching shells help them hide from baboons and secretary birds — are seriously endangered. Cowling, a conservation biologist at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, was working on defining a set of reserves that would maximize the chances of conserving all those species. The project was so large that it would end up as a series of 16 papers by 36 authors that occupied all 297 pages of Biological Conservation’ s July–August 2003 issue. And it was also, Cowling realized as he stared at the screen, “sheer nonsense”.