Watch this space. Full post to appear within next few hours. Keep these thoughts in mind; (1) vampire bats increase dramatically in numbers when megafauna (like modern livestock) are abundant; (2) there were lots more megafaunal elements in the Pleistocene than there are today. Hmm...
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In the previous post we looked at the biology and behaviour of vampire bats. This time we're going to take things a little bit further...
Prior to the spread of people and domestic livestock, it is thought that vampires (here we're mostly talking about the Common vampire Desmodus rotundus) most…

Did humans wipe out the Pleistocene megafauna? This is a question that can be asked separately for each area of the world colonized by Homo sapiens. It is also a question that engenders sometimes heated debate. A new paper coming out in the Journal of Human Evolution concludes that many…
A golden-mantled ground squirrel (Spermophilus lateralis), photographed in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah. Though abundant at the Samwell Cave Popcorn Dome, California site during the Late Pleistocene, its numbers in the area decline at the beginning of the present Holocene epoch.
"One of the…
In the previous post we saw that vampire bats were more diverse and more widespread during the Pleistocene than are they today. Two things stand out (to me) as being particularly interesting; firstly, that some of these vampires seem to have differed in morphology, and therefore presumably in…
Isn't Megafauna just a cool word? One of my favorites for sure. Megafauna megafauna... ahhh...
although, cows are nothing compared to giant sloths and stuff.
z.
Can vampire bats walk on two legs?