Virtual Living Room Lecture: Turkeys in California

Join the San Diego Archeological Center for a virtual presentation on Late Pleistocene Fossils by Ashwin Sivakumar.

Biologists have proposed that we could resurrect the roles of extinct species in ecosystems by introducing closely-related surviving species. However, this idea—called “taxon substitution”—has never been intentionally tested on a large scale.

California used to have a native turkey species, the California Turkey, that went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age. In the 20th century, a related species from the central and Eastern United States, the Wild Turkey, was introduced into California as hunting stock.

Since then, the Wild Turkey has multiplied and spread all across the state. This study uses fossil and current occurrence data as well as climate information from the Pleistocene and present to try to determine if the extant Wild Turkey is occupying an ecological niche analogous to that of the extinct California Turkey.

Date: Dec. 9, 2021
Time: 6:30pm
Location: Virtual Zoom Link
Cost: Free with Registration

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