I don't think that the existence of anti-girding thorns on honey locusts is posited as a reason for the disappearance of mastadons from North America. It is simply another piece of circumstantial evidence (a pretty cool one) that they were a well established part of the ecosystem (which we're pretty sure of anyway given the relative ubiquity of their remains throughout the continent).
It's pretty wild to imagine what North America was like until just several thousand years ago, when most of the megafauna was still here - mastadons, wooly mammoths, giant ground sloths, saber-tooths, camels, zebras, cheetahs, lions... Wow!
Btw (anal-retentive-hat-on), current understanding is that mastadons were not elephants or even elephant-ancestors - they were distant cousins, belonging to an entirely different Family (a taxonomic distance similar to that between us humans and gibbons).
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-12-29 06:33 pm (UTC)It's pretty wild to imagine what North America was like until just several thousand years ago, when most of the megafauna was still here - mastadons, wooly mammoths, giant ground sloths, saber-tooths, camels, zebras, cheetahs, lions... Wow!
Btw (anal-retentive-hat-on), current understanding is that mastadons were not elephants or even elephant-ancestors - they were distant cousins, belonging to an entirely different Family (a taxonomic distance similar to that between us humans and gibbons).