Steller’s Sea Cow and Their Not So Stellar Demise

This study examines another mechanism of human impact on large species. If humans hunted a keystone species to a certain tipping point or extinction, they may have indirectly triggered a collapse of a complex ecosystem, leading to a chain reaction resulting in the extinction of other species. Since it is difficult to study ecosystems that existed thousands of years ago, the authors researched a more recent megafauna extinction event of the Steller’s sea cow in the mid-1700s, for which a few in person observations from Georg Steller exist.