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The third Faculty Pub Night of the 2025-26 season features Wendy Binder, professor of biology (Seaver College of Science and Engineering). She will discuss her recent co-authored publication, "Pre–Younger Dryas megafaunal extirpation at Rancho La Brea linked to fire-driven state shift."

About Faculty Pub Night

Students, staff, faculty, alumni, and members of the public are all invited to the 2025-26 series of Faculty Pub Night at the William H. Hannon Library. Eight LMU professors are selected annually to discuss their latest publication or project in a comfortable setting and format that welcomes diverse perspectives for an inclusive conversation aimed to educate the entire community. All Faculty Pub Nights are free and open to the public.

About the Author's Work

At the end of the Pleistocene, about 12-13,000 years ago, most large mammals, known as megafauna (<100 pounds) became extinct, not only in North America, but around the planet. While the cause of the extinction has been researched for decades, there hasn’t been a clear single reason, as the purported causes include either climate change leading to changes in the plant community then affecting megafauna, humans killing off the megafauna, or a combination of the two. The relative importance of late-Pleistocene climate changes and human impacts have been difficult to disentangle in part because of poor chronological resolution in the fossil record. The Rancho La Brea asphaltic deposits provide a unique opportunity to investigate large-scale changes in megafaunal populations and community composition across the latest Pleistocene. These deposits entrapped and preserved the bones of thousands of individuals from numerous megafaunal species across the last 50,000 years of the Pleistocene, many of which can be accurately carbon dated. O’Keefe et al. (2023) utilized the extensive fossil record at the La Brea tar pits in conjunction with nearby core samples to discover a clear relationship between an increase in fire—and fire-related ecosystems—and large mammal extinction. The authors argue that this increase in fire may have resulted from climate change–induced warming and drying in conjunction with increasing impacts of humans in the system.

About the Author

Wendy Binder has been a professor of biology at Loyola Marymount University for over 20 years. Her primary areas of research are in evolutionary biology and paleontology. She has two active research projects, the first of which is studying fluctuating asymmetry in living species of rodents and coyotes in the Western USA. The second involves examining changes in extinct megafaunal mammals in the Late Pleistocene at the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits. Funded by a 2018 NSF grant of over $700K, the Tar Pits project is a collaboration with colleagues around the country with LMU students assisting in data collection. The project is multimodal in data collection, including dating fossils, studying the morphology, diet, taphonomy, and population dynamics of species within and between deposits at Rancho La Brea, and mapping them to climate change over time. There have been several publications from this research so far (with more that are currently being written), the most significant of which has been a publication in the journal Science in 2023, which is the basis of her talk today. She lives in Culver City with her husband, children, and two dogs.

About the William H. Hannon Library

The William H. Hannon Library fosters excellence in academic achievement through an array of distinctive services that enable learners to feed their curiosity, experience new worlds, develop their ideas, inform their decision-making, and inspire others. More information can be found at http://library.lmu.edu

For more information about this event, contact the Outreach and Engagement team at the William H. Hannon library via email at library.outreach@lmu.edu or call 310-338-5234.