Glyptodonts: Carved Teeth, Sculpted Carapace, & Club Tails with Greg McDonald скачать в хорошем качестве

Glyptodonts: Carved Teeth, Sculpted Carapace, & Club Tails with Greg McDonald

With its round, armored carapace, snub-nosed head and clubbed or spiked tail glyptodonts are among the most distinctive mammals of the South American megafauna. The large bony carapace is formed by hundreds of individual polygonal osteoderms with distinctive ornamentation distinguishing the different species. The earliest fossils of glyptodonts are from the late Eocene, ca, 38 million years. While the earliest species are small by the late Pleistocene many giant taxa had evolved and glyptodonts were found not only across most of South America but had dispersed into Central and North America after the formation of the isthmus of Panama around 2.7 million years ago. Now retired, Greg McDonald previously worked as a regional paleontologist for the Bureau of Land Management, as the Senior Curator of Natural History in the Washington Museum Management Program, National Park Service, as Paleontology Program Coordinator in the Geologic Resources Division and as the paleontologist at Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument. Prior to working for the government, he was Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and collections manager for vertebrate paleontology at the Idaho Museum of Natural History. He earned his doctorate at the University of Toronto, Masters at the University of Florida and Bachelor’s at Idaho State University. His research focuses on the extinct giant ground sloths and their relatives and Plio-Pleistocene mammals of North and South America. He is a co-editor of Smilodon: The Iconic Sabertooth and a co-author of The White River Badlands – Geology and Paleontology.