Arthur H. Harris
Laboratory for Environmental Biology, Centennial Museum, and
Department of Biological Sciences,
University of Texas at El Paso,
El Paso, Texas 79968
Foreword
This is a partial preview of a web book tentatively scheduled to go online in September of this year. The work was originally intended to end up in print. As work progressed, however, the advantages of a web format where definitions of terms could accessed with ease, links to other resources could provide depth otherwise impractical in terms of space and time, and updates quickly incorporated made it evident that internet publishing, though lacking the academic status of printed works, would best serve the audience—thus the present format.
A summary of Pleistocene taxa and sites, primarily cave faunas, appeared some years ago (Harris 1993c) and more recently Morgan and Lucas (2005) summarized information about a large number of open (i.e., non-cave) sites. Through the years, various papers concerned with individual taxa, sites, or regions of New Mexico and Trans-Pecos Texas have been published. To this time, however, there has been no work bringing the Pleistocene vertebrate fossil record together in one place. The intent of the present effort is to fill this niche. It is the aim of this work to provide information useful to both interested laypeople and scientists. I am well aware that such efforts often end up serving neither audiences well, but if the person with a general interest can manage to overlook some of the more esoteric material and the scientist some of what might seem elementary, perhaps both may find it not too bitter a pill.
Several conventions have been adopted in an attempt to make the site friendly. Terms that may be unfamiliar to the general reader are internal links in green, such as this example for the glossary. Other internal links, such as for citations, sites, taxa, or other divisions of the site, are in dark gray, as for the citation in the paragraph above. Once visited, the link appears in light gray. Off-site links are as in the browser default (usually blue for unvisited and red for visited unless changed by the viewer).
For the present, a single example from the taxonomic list is being opened up to the general public for comments and to hopefully raise a bit of interest in seeing the completed work when it becomes available. Each taxon will have a map of the region showing Pleistocene fossil occurrences along with comments concerning the organism and sites of occurrence. Other examples of taxa will be added shortly.
Ultimately, each site will have an entry with a list of taxa from that site along with other pertinent site data and a location map.
Taxonomic and common names follow The Center for North American Herpetology for amphibians, reptiles, and turtles; The American Ornithologists' Union Check-list of North American Birds for extant birds, and Mammal Species of the World for extant mammals. Since this is very much a work in progress, the literature cited section hasn't been cleaned up.
Please send comments to aharris@utep.edu.
Links to Available Taxa
Ambystoma mavortium Barred Tiger Salamander.
Links to Available Sites
Last update: 14 May 2008