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Five alcoves (rock shelters) in the Forty-Mile Canyon—Willow Gulch area of the Escalante River Basin in southeastern Utah yielded rich deposits of late Quaternary macrobotanical remains. The deposits were sampled and the contents identified in order to construct a chronology of vegetational change. Fourteen radiocarbon dates indicate that the fossils were deposited between 12,690 and 7510 yr B.P. (years before present). Ninety-one plant taxa were identified, 62 to species. Six species were common to all alcoves: Gambel oak (Quercus gambelii), box-elder (Acer negundo), prickly pear (Opuntia subgenus Platyopuntia), skunkbush (Rhus aromatica var. trilobata), serviceberry (Amelanchier utahensis), and Indian ricegrass...
The present distribution of the Mexican vole (Microtus mexicanus) is not entirely the product of post-Pleistocene forest fragmentation and extinction; recent dispersal also is indicated. Literature records further suggest that this phenomenon may reflect a general pattern of northward range expansion in many southwestern mammal species. Published in Western North American Naturalist, volume 52, issue 3, in 1992.
* 1 A classic biogeographic pattern is the alignment of diploid, tetraploid and hexaploid races of creosote bush (Larrea tridentata) across the Chihuahuan, Sonoran and Mohave Deserts of western North America. We used statistically robust differences in guard cell size of modern plants and fossil leaves from packrat middens to map current and past distributions of these ploidy races since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). * 2 Glacial/early Holocene (26?10 14C kyr bp or thousands of radiocarbon years before present) populations included diploids along the lower Rio Grande of west Texas, 650 km removed from sympatric diploids and tetraploids in the lower Colorado River Basin of south-eastern California/south-western...
Fossil remains of Euceratherium collinum (extinct shrub-ox) have been found throughout North America, including the Grand Canyon. Recent finds from the Escalante River Basin in southern Utah further extend the animal's range into the heart of the Colorado Plateau. E. collinum teeth and a metapodial condyle (foot bone) have been recovered in association with large distinctively shaped dung pellets, a morphology similar to a ?Hershey's Kiss? (HK), from a late Pleistocene dung layer in Bechan Cave. HK dung pellets have also been recovered from other alcoves in the Escalante River Basin including Willow and Fortymile canyons. Detailed analyses of the HK pellets confirmed them to be E. collinum and indicate a browser-type...
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Sixty packrat middens were collected in Canyonlands and Grand Canyon National Parks, and these series include sites north of areas that produced previous detailed series from the Colorado Plateau. The exceptionally long time series obtained from each of three sites (>48,000 C-14 yr BP to present) include some of the oldest middens yet discovered. Most middens contain a typical late-Wisconsinan glaciation mixture of mesic and xeric taxa, evidence that plant species responded to climate change by range adjustments of elevational distribution based oil individual criteria, Differences in elevational range from today for trees and shrubs ranged from no apparent change to as much as 1200 m difference. The oldest middens...
    map background search result map search result map 50,000 years of vegetation and climate history on the Colorado Plateau, Utah and Arizona, USA 50,000 years of vegetation and climate history on the Colorado Plateau, Utah and Arizona, USA