2013/03/05 by Natalia Rybczynski, John Gosse, C. R. Harington +3 · 6 citations
Social Sciences · Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology #Geology and Paleoclimatology Research #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/ncomms2516
openalex publication_date 2013/03/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
The mid-Pliocene was a global warm period, preceding the onset of Quaternary glaciations. Here we use cosmogenic nuclide dating to show that a fossiliferous terrestrial deposit that includes subfossil trees and the northern-most evidence of Pliocene ice wedge casts in Canada’s High Arctic (Ellesmere Island, Nunavut) was deposited during the mid-Pliocene warm period. The age estimates correspond to a general maximum in high latitude mean winter season insolation, consistent with the presence of a rich, boreal-type forest. Moreover, we report that these deposits have yielded the first evidence of a High Arctic camel, identified using collagen fingerprinting of a fragmentary fossil limb bone. Camels originated in North America and dispersed to Eurasia via the Bering Isthmus, an ephemeral land bridge linking Alaska and Russia. The results suggest that the evolutionary history of modern camels can be traced back to a lineage of giant camels that was well established in a forested Arctic. Camels originated in North America during the Eocene period ~45 million years ago. This study reports evidence of a High Arctic camel from Ellesmere Island, which extends the range of North American camels northward by ~1,200 km to a lineage of giant camels that were well established in a forested Arctic.