Ice Age mammals in the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca

Abstract

The Sierra Norte de Oaxaca is home to an extraordinary diversity of wild mammals, such as jaguars, white-tailed deer, tapirs, rodents, bats, and shrews. However, just a few thousand years ago, other notable species also lived there, which no longer exist. It is possible that during the Last Glacial Maximum (or Ice Age), a markedly cold and dry period in Earth’s history, some large mammals such as the Mexican glyptodonts, giant sloths, and Columbian mammoths were also common inhabitants of this region, for which mammalian communities were even more prosperous and diverse than we know today. This article tries to remind us that the diversity and distribution of species are not static but changing. What we see today was not so in the past and will not be so in the future.