Lost Worlds of Eastern North America: Fauna, Flora, and Environments from the Pleistocene to 1492

Before forests, farms, highways, and cities transformed the landscape, eastern North America was home to a world that would seem almost unimaginable today.Lost Worlds of Eastern North America journeys into the deep past to explore the remarkable animals, environments, and ecological communities that once occupied the eastern half of the continent. From the great mammals of the Pleistocene to the species encountered by Indigenous peoples before European colonization, this book reconstructs a changing natural world across thousands of years.Columbian mammoths and mastodons moved through ancient woodlands and open landscapes. Giant ground sloths, enormous beavers, peccaries, horses, camels, bears, great cats, and countless smaller animals occupied ecosystems dramatically different from those of the modern East. Rivers, coastlines, forests, grasslands, wetlands, and climatic boundaries shifted repeatedly as glaciers advanced and retreated and sea levels rose and fell.Drawing on paleontology, archaeology, zooarchaeology, historical ecology, and the fossil record, Lost Worlds of Eastern North America examines these animals not merely as isolated species, but as members of interconnected environments. It considers where they lived, how they survived, what other organisms shared their habitats, and how changing climate, landscapes, extinction, and human presence reshaped the continent.The story continues beyond the disappearance of the great Ice Age mammals, following eastern North American wildlife into the Holocene and the centuries before 1492. In doing so, the book reveals a continent that was never static, but continuously transformed by climate, ecological succession, migration, extinction, and human activity.Written for readers fascinated by prehistoric life, natural history, archaeology, wildlife, and the forgotten landscapes beneath the modern world, Lost Worlds of Eastern North America offers a broad portrait of a continent whose vanished ecosystems can still be traced through fossils, bones, sediments, and living descendants.The modern East is only the latest chapter.Beneath it lie lost worlds.