Extinct Flightless Duck Analysis

New theory on Ice Age species drawn

A Cal Poly professor says weather changes and maybe a catastrophic event contributed to their extinction — going against the belief that American Indians were responsible

By Nick Wilson

An examination of the history of the extinct flightless duck that lived on the West Coast more than 2,000 years ago has led a Cal Poly professor to develop a new theory relating to the demise of nearly three dozen Ice Age species.

Archaeologist Terry Jones is using the bird’s case to argue that American Indians didn’t kill off 35 species — including the mammoth and giant sloth—13,000 years ago in the span of four centuries.

Jones said he believes weather changes and possibly a catastrophic event on Earth contributed to the extinctions of the Ice Age species.

Jones published an article on his research in the March 18 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — one of the nation’s pre-eminent science journals.

Flightless ducks were about the size of geese. They swam in the Pacific Ocean and rested on West Coast shores, including the Central Coast, for thousands of years.

American Indians hunted the duck for more than 8,000 years, leading to the bird’s extinction about 2,400

years ago.

“The record of the human (hunting) of mammoths is only about 300 or 400 years long,” Jones said. “I think the flightless duck case shows how long it would take people to wipe out a species, and this was a particularly vulnerable species.”

Because they couldn’t fly, the ducks were easy to hunt. And it also was easy for people to collect their eggs—a recipe for quick extinction.

“It’s surprising it took 8,000 years to wipe them out,” the Cal Poly professor said. “They were literally sitting ducks.”

The flightless duck is invaluable for archaeologists because its one of the best documented cases of a prehistoric extinction caused by people, Jones said. Many of the Ice Age animals don’t have a record of human hunting.

Over the past few years, Jones examined 66 of the duck’s bones found at Diablo Canyon in 1968 by archaeologist Roberta Greenwood before the nuclear power plant was built. Greenwood unear thed more than 3,000 bones of various species, which Jones has been identifying.

Much about the flightless ducks isn’t known, including how they looked or what they ate.

Jones has sent their bones to a laboratory for isotope and DNA research. Those studies will help him to determine the duck’s diet and some of its closest relatives.