Next Meeting – May 13th
Our next meeting will be held in person and on Zoom on Wednesday, May 13th, at 7:00 p.m. in the lyceum at the Fort Lewis College Center of Southwest Studies. After a brief business meeting, John Kappelman, PhD, will present “How today’s African fauna came to be: Continental collisions and climate change, and dispersals and extinctions.” A reception will start things off at 6:30 p.m. in the CSWS foyer.
Today’s African fauna represents one the most iconic assortments of animals on planet Earth. For example, if you show a picture of apes, monkeys, elephants, lions, antelope, rhinos and hippos to a group of schoolchildren, they will tell you that these animals live in Africa. The question though is how it originated? For decades, scientists have had a solid understanding of the before and after: before, Afro-Arabia was an island continent with an endemic fauna that evolved in ‘splendid isolation’ from that of Eurasia. After, following the docking of these two continents, Eurasian immigrants dominated Afro-Arabia and continue to do so; the endemic Afro-Arabian fauna that had undergone an earlier dramatic radiation went largely extinct with only a few taxa surviving. This lecture will review the before and after and present new data from the time period of 21 to 25 million years ago that for the first time illuminate the what, when, and where of the turnover event and show how the African fauna came to be.
John Kappelman was born and raised on a small family farm in southwestern Idaho. He received a B.S. in Geology and Geophysics from Yale University, and an M.A. in Anthropology and Ph.D. in Anthropology and Earth and Planetary Sciences, both from Harvard University. He recently retired after serving for 35 years as a professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, and continues his association with UT Austin as Professor Emeritus. The primary focus of his research is ape and human origins and evolution, with particular emphasis in paleoecology and functional morphology, and stratigraphy and geochronology. He conducts field and laboratory research in paleontology, stratigraphy, and paleomagnetism, and laboratory research in functional morphology and computer imaging. He has worked all around the world and runs current field projects in Kenya and Ethiopia. He and his lab members have built many web sites including eSkeletons, eLucy, eFossils, and eAnthro Labs. For the past 20 years, he split his time between Austin and Pagosa Springs, and now hangs his spurs full time at the Frying Pan Lazy K ranch outside of Pagosa Springs.
Link to Join Webinar – https://fortlewis.zoom.us/j/94032371260 – Meeting ID: 940 3237 1260